The Amazon Kindle has many of the same features found on the base Paperwhite and Oasis. Some people are enamored with E INK screens, which are very pleasing to the eye and one of the contributing factors to long battery life. Others, such as dictionaries, Wikipedia, or X-Ray, which break down the people, places, and things found in the book. Dark mode is very popular when reading at night, as you can invert colors so that the background is black and the text is white. Speaking of reading at night, all modern Kindles now support a front-lit display that distributes light evenly across the screen instead of into your eyes. With so many features available on the Kindle, what’s your favorite?
The Kindle originally came out in 2017 and had a full keyboard and page-turning buttons without a touch screen. As they grew older, e-books became more and more functional. Amazon has always been one of those companies that reacted to the integration of new features and improvements. They never do anything first, but they wait and see what other brands do and whether customers accept it or not. For example, Sony was the first to adopt a front-lit display, but it wasn’t until the advent of Barnes and Noble Simple Touch with Glowlight that modern white LEDs became mainstream. After that, everyone started to accept it. The same goes for amber LEDs, Amazon was not the first to develop this technology.
However, most of the new features and improvements that Amazon has made for the Kindle have been at the software level. They were the first e-book company to introduce Overdrive e-book lending in the United States, bought the social media book search site Good Reads, and made it the centerpiece of the Kindle user interface so millions of users started using it. Amazon has also developed a number of unique fonts that are some of the best in the business, such as Bookerly and Ember. They also made the book reading setup simplistic and full of features. Their approach was to offer enough, but not so much that it confuses users. Amazon was also the first American company to use the language conversion software Bing so users could look up a word from one language to another, which aided in learning.
Audible, listening to an audiobook while reading an e-book, social media sharing, dictionaries, 3G/4G/LTE internet access, and all sorts of hardware innovations like Page Press on Voyage. What is your favorite feature in Kindle?
Michael Kozlowski has been writing about audiobooks and e-books for the last twelve years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as CBC, CNET, Engadget, the Huffington Post and the New York Times. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.