Top 6 Kindle Features You Didn’t Know Existed

A Kindle looks like a device with one job. Open book, read book, close book.

It is not, quite. There are six things in there that Amazon barely mentions, all of them sitting behind a menu most people never open. These are the ones actually worth knowing about.

1. X-Ray, for when you have lost track of everyone

You are two hundred pages into a fantasy with a large cast and someone called Aldric has just walked back in. No idea. None.

X-Ray pulls up every character, place and term in the book, with the passages they appear in, without leaving your page. Tap the top of the screen while reading, then choose X-Ray.

It is at its best in exactly the books that need it most: sprawling series, political fantasy, anything with three timelines. Not every title has it, but most big releases do.

2. Page Flip, for skimming without losing your spot

Page Flip lets you jump around a book while your actual place stays pinned where it was.

Tap the screen and look for the small square icon near the bottom. From there you can scroll through page thumbnails, check the map at the front, reread the paragraph that just gutted you, then land straight back where you were.

Anyone who has lost their place trying to check something has needed this and not known it existed.

3. Vocabulary Builder, quietly collecting words for you

Every word you look up in the built-in dictionary gets saved to a list automatically. That list turns into flashcards.

Find it under Vocabulary Builder in the menu, and check it is switched on in settings first.

It is genuinely useful if you are learning a language on the side. It is also a slightly embarrassing record of every word you have pretended to know.

4. Adjustable warm light, for reading late

The screen light shifts from cold white towards amber, on a slider, in Settings under Display.

Warm at night, cooler in daylight. It makes an hour before bed feel considerably less like staring at a phone.

Worth knowing: this one is not on every model. It is on the Paperwhite, Signature Edition and Colorsoft, not the base Kindle.

5. Send to Kindle, for everything that is not a book

Your Kindle has its own email address, tucked away in the settings.

Send a PDF, a Word document or a long article to it and it arrives as something readable, on e-ink, without notifications. Recipes. Itineraries. A friend's manuscript you promised to read three months ago.

6. Whispersync, so you never lose your place

Whispersync keeps your position, notes and bookmarks in step across every device on your Amazon account.

Kindle at home, phone app in a queue somewhere, same line either way. If you also own the Audible version of a book, it will hand you between reading and listening at the same spot.

The one thing that trips it up is wifi: the Kindle has to have been online recently to report where you got to. We go through the setup properly in our Whispersync guide.

Which to try first

X-Ray and Page Flip, without question. Both take one tap, both fix an annoyance you have probably stopped noticing you have.

The rest will still be there next time it rains. If you want the wider list, we have ten more Kindle tips covering the everyday settings.

One last thing. A Kindle that does all this spends its life in bags, on benches and under pillows, so give it somewhere good to sit: Kindle cases at Case Society Co, and a good home to be read in.