What Font Should You Use for an Ebook?
Quick Answer: For body text, use a screen-optimized serif font: Georgia, Literata, or Palatino. For headings, use a clean sans-serif like Arial or Roboto. In practice, most ebook reading apps let readers override your font choice, so your selection is a sensible default rather than a final decision. Focus on structure and consistency over specific font selection.
Font choice matters less for ebooks than for print because readers control how the text appears on their screen. A Kindle user can switch between Bookerly, Georgia, OpenDyslexic, and several other options regardless of what font you embedded. Your job is to provide a good default and make sure your formatting works well with whatever font the reader chooses.
Best Fonts for Ebook Body Text
Georgia. The most widely supported screen serif. It renders well on e-ink Kindles, tablets, and phones. Large x-height makes it readable at small sizes. Available on virtually every device and operating system.
Literata. Originally designed for Google Play Books, now open-source and widely available. Optimized for screen reading with excellent performance on both e-ink and LCD/OLED screens. A strong choice for cross-platform ebooks.
Palatino (or Book Antiqua). A classic serif with an elegant feel that works well for literary fiction, essays, and formal non-fiction. Slightly more traditional than Georgia or Literata.
Bookerly. Amazon's proprietary font for Kindle devices, designed specifically for digital reading with optimized kerning and ligatures. You can't embed Bookerly in your EPUB, but if your primary audience reads on Kindle, designing your ebook to look good in Bookerly is practical.
Best Fonts for Ebook Headings
A sans-serif font for headings provides visual contrast against serif body text. Arial, Roboto, and Helvetica are safe, widely supported choices. Avoid decorative or display fonts for headings because they render unpredictably across devices and become unreadable at small sizes.
What to Avoid
Avoid using more than two font families (one for body, one for headings). Avoid decorative or script fonts for body text. Avoid embedding fonts with restrictive licenses that don't permit ebook distribution. And avoid assuming your font choice will be seen by every reader, because most e-reader apps allow user overrides.
Bottom Line
Pick Georgia or Literata for body text, a clean sans-serif for headings, and spend your energy on consistent formatting rather than font selection. Your readers will choose their own font on most platforms anyway. For more on interior formatting, see Interior Ebook Formatting: Typography and Chapter Styles.
Q: Can you embed custom fonts in an ebook? A: You can embed fonts in EPUB files, but the font's license must permit it, and readers can still override your choice on most platforms. Embedding adds to file size. For most ebooks, specifying widely available fonts with fallbacks is more practical than embedding custom ones.
Q: Does the font affect ebook file size? A: Yes. Each embedded font weight (regular, bold, italic, bold italic) adds 50 to 200 KB to the file. For a text-only ebook, this is a small percentage of the total. For image-heavy ebooks, the additional size is usually negligible.