Amazon Page Flip launched in 2016 and is a system that “pins” your current page to the side of the screen when you swipe away from it to explore other parts of the book. Tap your pinned page to instantly jump back to it. It also allows you to zoom out to get a bird’s eye view of the book and quickly find what you’re looking for. Page Flip is available on the Kindle, Fire tablets and the Kindle app for Android and iOS. Today, Amazon has added the functionality to comics and graphic novels on iOS and eventually will be ported over to Kindle e-readers.
Page Flip speaks to the delicate balance the company tries to strike when blending the freedoms of software with the traditional and comfortable act of reading words on a page. Kindle’s core audience will always be those who love to read, and have likely spent a large chunk of their lives doing so on paper. So any new feature risks over-complicating the situation. Amazon doesn’t want reading an e-book to be too similar to a news website or document app, or else it runs counter to the format’s promise of supplanting print.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
