Checking a printed book for readability
There is one pass on a proof that almost nobody runs. Not proofreading, not checking the spine — reading the book the way a person with tired eyes, poor light or failing vision will.
It matters more in print than anywhere else, because paper cannot be resized. An ebook reader can raise the type, change the face and invert the page, which is why accessibility in an ebook is a file problem with a file solution — see Accessible ebooks, and why they are now everyone's problem. A printed book is fixed at upload. Whatever you set is what every reader gets.
Set the test up honestly
Two rules, and they are the whole method.
Ordinary indoor light, not your desk lamp. A lamp throwing light straight onto the page is the best reading condition your book will ever have. Test it in a living room in the evening instead.
Arm's length, not proofing distance. You read proofs close, with intent. Readers hold a book where it is comfortable, and older eyes hold it further away. If you have to bring the book toward you, so will they.
Type size and leading
Read a full page and notice whether your eye ever loses the line and restarts it.
Losing the line is a leading problem far more often than a size problem. Type set too tightly makes long lines hard to track, and a reader who has to find the start of each line again gets tired in a way they will describe as "hard to read" without knowing why. Type size, leading and the line that reads well covers the settings; the proof tells you whether they worked.
How black is the ink, really
Hold a page of your body text next to something you know is set in solid black — the copyright page of a traditionally published book is a fair reference.
Gray body text is the single most common readability failure in self-published books. It arrives innocently: a choice made on a bright screen, where a soft gray looks refined. On paper, in a lamplit room, it is simply faint, and the cost falls entirely on the readers with the weakest sight.
Check the same thing in the places gray hides: running heads, folios, chapter subtitles, epigraphs and captions.
The five things that cost more than they look
Work through the proof hunting specifically for these.
- Light or condensed weights. A hairline or a narrow face loses its thin strokes as ink spreads into the paper. It can survive as a chapter number. It cannot carry a paragraph.
- Text over a photograph. The worst case in the book, because the background changes underneath the letters. Read it at arm's length in dim light, and if any word needs a second look, put a solid panel behind the text or move it off the image.
- Long stretches of italic. Fine for a word or a line of dialogue. A six-page italic dream sequence, or a run of letters between characters, is genuinely harder to read.
- All-caps passages. Capitals remove the word shapes that fast reading depends on. A chapter opening in caps is a design decision; a page of it is an obstacle.
- The page number. It has to be findable. A reader coming back to a book, or matching a page to a book club, hunts for the folio. If it is tiny, pale, set in a light weight or tucked into a corner, it fails the one job it has.
In the Interior Formatter. Its six body faces are all text faces chosen to hold up in print, and a separate Large Print edition sets the book at 6 × 9 and 16 pt, ragged right, in Luciole — a typeface drawn specifically for low-vision readers. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
Paper does half the work
Two paper questions belong in this pass rather than the design one.
Cream against bright white. For continuous reading, many readers find cream stock easier on the eyes than bright white, because it reflects less and cuts the glare the page throws back. White is still right for books with photographs, but for a novel read for hours it is worth handling both. White or cream paper? covers the trade.
Show-through. Look at the back of a heavily inked page. A full-page image or a dark table can ghost through, and the next page is then read over a faint shadow of something else. The proof is the only place you will see it.
Large print is an edition, not a setting
This is the part most print authors miss entirely.
A large print book is a separate edition with its own page count, its own spine and its own ISBN. You do not tick a box on the normal edition; you build a second one. Ours is 6 × 9 at 16 pt, set ragged right in Luciole, a face drawn for low-vision readers. The ragged right edge is deliberate: even word spacing matters more than a straight margin when every line is being worked at.
It is also the highest-value accessibility step available to a print author, and the one with a readership attached — libraries buy large print, and the readers who need it search for it. The large print edition most authors never make has the rest.
The honest test
Give the proof to someone over sixty, in a normally lit room, and ask them to read a page aloud.
Then say nothing and watch. Do they hold it further away? Tilt it toward a lamp? Move to a window? Every one of those is an answer, and it is a better answer than your own eyes will give you about a book you have already read forty times.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: The proof checklist, front to back · More: Proofing a hardcover · Type size, leading and the line that reads well · The large print edition most authors never make