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if you have If you have a Kindle for reading e-books (perhaps a newer model like the Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition or Kindle Colorsoft), then you’ll know that these devices are incredibly simple in terms of interfaces and controls. The focus is on the text and whatever you are reading.
However, behind the simple and friendly interface, the Kindle has more features and tricks than you might expect. Sure, these e-readers won’t compete with iPads in terms of functionality, but there are a lot of things you can do with them, from personalizing the reading experience to displaying content on the screen in addition to e-books.
1. Find words
Don’t be thrown off by unfamiliar words you encounter while reading. You can get definitions of anything on screen by simply long-pressing on the word. When the definition appears, you can swipe left to see if there is a Wikipedia entry for the word and swipe left again to translate the word into another language.
2. Send web articles to your Kindle
You can also use your Kindle to catch up on your reading online by sending web articles to the device. Perhaps the simplest option is the official Kindle extension for Google Chrome, as long as you only want to submit articles from a desktop web browser. Once you’re signed in to your Amazon account, item transfers only take a few clicks.
The Kindle extension is fast and free, but it doesn’t always format the web page correctly and doesn’t work on mobile devices. Instapaper does a better job with its own Kindle sync service, but you need the $6 per month premium plan to access it. Send to Kindle It’s also good, but a $3/month subscription is required to submit 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. Simply touch two diagonally opposite corners, right at the corner. The screen flashes and the screenshot is saved. Connect your Kindle to a computer with a USB cable and you’ll find all your screenshots saved in their own dedicated folder.
4. Categorize your eBooks into collections
As you add more and more ebooks (and web articles) to your library, it can start to get a little unwieldy and sorting through them to find your next read becomes more difficult. You can mitigate this to some extent by creating collections. Basically, these are folders to sort titles, either by genre, by author, or by when you want to read them.
To get started, from the Kindle home page, tap the three dots at the top right, then Create a collection. Name your collection and favorite it if you like (which makes it appear more prominent on multiple screens). You can then choose to sort the Library page by collections; Just tap the sort by icon, the three horizontal lines at the top right.