The Amazon Kindle has a bevy of features that are found on the base model, Paperwhite and Oasis. Some people are enamored with the E INK screens that are very easy on the eyes and are one of the contributors towards long battery life. Others, like the dictionaries, Wikipedia or X-Ray, which breaks down the people, places and things found in a book. Dark mode is very popular when reading at night, since you can invert the colors, so the background is black and text is white. Speaking of reading at night, all modern Kindles now support a front-lit display, which projects light evenly across the screen and not into your eyes. Since, the Kindle has so many features available, what is your favorite one?
The Kindle initially came out in 2007 and had a full keyboard and page turn buttons with no touchscreen. As the e-readers matured they started to get more functionality. Amazon has always been one of those companies that have been reactionary with their integration of new features and enhancements. They are never the first ones to do anything, but they wait and see what other brands are doing and if customers embrace it or not. For example, Sony was the first one to adopt a front-lit display, but it wasn’t util the the Barnes and Noble Simple Touch with Glowlight came out, that modern white LEDS gained traction. Afterwards, everyone started to adopt it. The same goes with amber led lights, Amazon wasn’t the first ones to develop the tech.
However, most of the new features and enhancements that Amazon made for the Kindle were on the software level. They were the first e-reader company to embrace Overdrive ebook lending in the United States and bought the social media book discover site Good Reads and made it front and center in the Kindle UI, so millions of users started to use it. Amazon also developed a number of unique fonts that are some of the best in the business, such as Bookerly and Ember. They also made customization of the book reading experience simplistic and full of features. Their approach was to offer just enough, but not so much, that it confused users. Amazon was also the first American company to use the Bing language conversion software, so users can look up a word in one language to another, which helped with learning.
Audible, listening to an audiobook while reading an ebook, social media sharing, dictionaries, 3G/4G/LTE internet access and all sorts of hardware innovations such as Page Press on the Voyage. What is your favorite feature on the Kindle?
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.
