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If you've got yourself a Kindle for e-book reading—maybe a brand-new model like the Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition or Kindle Colorsoft—then you'll know these devices are brilliantly simple in terms of their interfaces and controls. The focus is on the text and whatever you happen to be reading.
Behind the simple and friendly interface though, the Kindle has more features and tricks than you might expect. Sure, these e-readers aren't going to compete with iPads for functionality, but there's a lot you can do with them—from customizing the reading experience to getting content other than ebooks onto the screen.
1. Look Up Words
Don't be flummoxed by unfamiliar words you come across while reading. You can get definitions for anything onscreen just by pressing and holding on the word. When the definition appears, you can swipe to the left to see if there's a Wikipedia entry for the word, and swipe left again to have the word translated into another language.
2. Send Web Articles to Your Kindle
You can also use your Kindle to catch up on your online reading, by sending web articles to the device. Perhaps the easiest option is the official Kindle extension for Google Chrome—as long as you only want to send articles from a desktop web browser. Once you're signed into your Amazon account, article transfers only take a few clicks.
The Kindle extension is quick and free, but it doesn't always get web page formatting right, and it doesn't work on mobile. Instapaper does a better job with its own Kindle-sync service, but you need the $6-per-month premium plan to access it. Push to Kindle is good too, but a $3-per-month subscription is required to send more than 10 articles per month.
3. Take a Screenshot
You can take screenshots on a Kindle, if you want to show off your library or share a passage from a book on social media, for example. Just tap two diagonally opposite corners, right in the corner. The screen flashes, and the screengrab is saved. Connect your Kindle up to a computer with a USB cable, and you'll find all your screenshots saved in their own dedicated folder.
4. Sort Your Ebooks Into Collections
As you add more and more ebooks (and web articles) to your library, it can start to get a bit unwieldy—and sorting through it to find your next read becomes more difficult. You can mitigate this to some extent by creating collections. These are essentially folders to sort titles into, whether it's by genre, by author, or how soon you want to read them.
To get started, from the Kindle’s homepage tap the three dots in the top right, then Create a Collection. Give your collection a name, and mark it as a favorite if you want (which makes it appear more prominently across various screens). You can then opt to sort the Library page by collections—just tap the sort-by icon, the three horizontal lines in the top right.
5. See Book Covers More Often
If you miss the old experience of seeing the cover every time you close your paper book, you can get the digital equivalent by setting the cover of the ebook you're currently reading as the Kindle screensaver. From the home screen, tap the three dots (top right), then choose Settings > Screen and brightness and enable the Show covers on lock screen option.
6. Change the Screen Warmth
If you have a Kindle Paperwhite, Oasis, or Colorsoft, you can access a warmth setting for the screen—this changes the tint of the display, so your eyes don't have to strain so much when reading text. To find the relevant settings from the homepage, tap the three dots (top right), then Settings > Screen and brightness > Brightness and warmth.
This can be especially useful late at night, when you might be reading in the dark, but you can use it anytime and in any scenario you like. Adjust the Warmth slider as needed, and turn on the Warmth schedule toggle switch to get the display to adjust automatically based on the time of day. You can set start and end times, and a level of warmth.
7. Check Your Progress
Tap down in the bottom-left corner of the screen to change how your progress through the current ebook is indicated. You can see your current page number (based on font size and page settings), your current reading location as a fixed number, the reading time remaining in the current chapter, and the reading time remaining for the whole ebook. These times get adjusted dynamically as your Kindle tracks how quickly you’re progressing through each book.
8. Install the Other Kindle Apps
Besides using the Kindle device, you can also install Kindle apps for Android and iOS, as well as Windows and macOS. There's even a web app for reading in the browser. While the reading experience on these other screens isn't quite as good as it is on a dedicated e-reader, as long as you use the same Amazon account, all of your reading across all of these devices will be synced up.
That means you can grab five minutes of reading time on the bus on your phone, even if you don't have your actual Kindle; or you can get through a few pages between meetings on your laptop. When you pick up your e-reader again, you'll find your reading position updated, and it's a simple trick for getting through your list of ebooks more quickly.
9. Get a Text Style You’re Comfortable With
Tap near the top of the page when reading a book, then tap the Aa icon, and you can access a range of options to get the text onscreen looking exactly the way you want. You're able to adjust the spacing between lines, the alignment of paragraphs, the style and size of the main font, and even the size of the page margins.
