How to Use Kindle Whispersync – 5 Tips Every Reader Should Know

You are three chapters into something good and the Kindle is on the kitchen bench at home.

Whispersync is the fix for that. It keeps your place, your notes and your bookmarks in step across every device signed into your Amazon account, so the phone app opens on the exact line you stopped at. It is free, it is already on most Kindles, and almost nobody sets it up properly.

1. What Whispersync actually does

Two different things share the name, which is where most of the confusion starts.

Whispersync for Books is the free one. It syncs your furthest page read, your highlights and your bookmarks between your Kindle, the Kindle phone and tablet apps, and Kindle Cloud Reader on a computer. Nothing to buy.

Whispersync for Voice is the audiobook half. It hands you between reading and listening at the same point in the story. This one needs you to own both the Kindle book and its Audible audiobook, so it is only free in the sense that the feature costs nothing once you have both.

It works on Kindle e-readers going back years, on Fire tablets, and on the Kindle app for iOS and Android.

2. Setting it up

On the Amazon site, go to Account, then Manage Your Content and Devices, then the Preferences tab. Find Device Synchronisation and make sure it is switched on.

On the Kindle itself: Settings, then Device Options, then Advanced Options.

Then connect to wifi. This is the step that quietly breaks everything for people. A Kindle can only report where you got to if it has been online since you got there, so if you read a whole novel in aeroplane mode, nothing syncs until you reconnect.

3. Finding the audiobook half without paying twice

If Whispersync for Voice appeals, the trick is not to buy the two halves separately at full price.

Amazon's Matchmaker page shows you which books already in your Kindle library have a discounted Audible companion. Buying the Kindle book first and adding the narration afterwards is almost always cheaper than buying the audiobook outright.

Audible runs sales often enough that it is worth waiting on anything you are not desperate for.

4. The bits most people never find

Time Left in Chapter tells you whether you can finish this section before your stop. Genuinely the most used feature on my own Kindle.

Popular Highlights shows you the lines other readers stopped on. Slightly spoilery in a thriller, lovely in a slow literary novel.

Your position in the audiobook and your position in the text are tracked separately until you switch, so listening ahead while cooking does not lose the page you were reading in bed.

5. When it stops working

Almost always wifi. Check that first, every time.

After that, in order: confirm Device Synchronisation is still enabled in your Amazon account, force a sync by swiping down from the top of the Kindle screen and tapping Sync, then restart the device. The old fix is the old fix for a reason.

If one particular book refuses to behave while everything else is fine, remove it from the device and download it again. That clears it more often than not.

Worth the ten minutes

Set it up once and you stop thinking about it, which is the whole point. No more thumbing back through a chapter trying to recognise a paragraph.

If you want the wider list, we have ten Kindle tips and six features most readers miss.

And for the device that carries all of it: Kindle cases at Case Society Co, and a good home to be read in.