Reading Your Stuff

Some people read books by just reading them. Other people read books by reading, underlining, jotting down notes in the margins, skipping around, and all kinds of other habits. Amazon, to their credit, knew this about people. The Kindle represents their best effort at replacing books with a single device that accounts for their readers’ different habits.

The reality is that, with a Kindle, you’ll have to change certain habits. But, if reading for you is a lot more than just reading, most of your old habits, like underlining or note-taking, can survive in a new form with a Kindle.

Navigating What You Read

You might think that reading a book is mostly just about turning pages, and of course you’re right. But, if your book has a table of contents, index, or endnotes you want to use, well, then you’re turning to the right pages.

Reading books on your Kindle is mostly just a matter of turning pages, using the Next Page and Prev Page buttons. Had Amazon made it involve much more than this, they’d have missed the whole point of trying to replace books with an electronic reader.

Most other navigation, like going to specific places from tables of contents or endnotes, works like a link in a web browser. For example, if you’re viewing the table of contents for a book and want to skip straight to Chapter 4, you’d use the joystick to scroll the cursor down to where it says Chapter 4. A click of the joystick will take you straight there.

Note: You can tell ...

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