On Kindle's New Page Flip Feature

The other day, I got an email from Amazon introducing me to a snazzy new Kindle feature called Page Flip.

Page Flip, it said, is a way of making the Kindle reading experience very similar to that of a normal book. Intrigued, I clicked over to Amazon's site to read more.

Essentially, what Page Flip does is it saves your place so that you can scroll to other pages without worrying about finding your place again. Not only that, but it can make scrolling much faster, by displaying the pages in a grid format. And when you're done exploring other parts of the book, you can be back on your original page with a single tap.

All very nice, I thought, but it can't possibly be as good as Amazon makes it out to be. After all, as much as I love Kindles, they can never be as flippable as a book. Right?

But then, today, I opened up the Kindle app on my phone. It happened to have a book already open -- the last book I read using my phone (Morium by SJ Hermann, in case you were wondering). By some work of electronic voodoo, Page Flip had already installed without my noticing.

Well, I decided to give it a try. I flipped around a bit, and then popped back to the cover page (I always put books I finish back to the cover page -- it's a compulsion). It seemed to work all right. But I was looking for something else to read, so I closed the book and scrolled through my library. I caught sight of a book that I started a while back but hadn't read more than a couple of chapters of, so I clicked on that. It opened to my place, and I began to read.

I soon realised that I'd forgotten most of the beginning. Part of me thought, "Oh darn, now I'm going to lose my place," but then I realised, hey! Page Flip is a thing now!

So, I hit the Page Flip button and whizzed back to the start. After I'd refreshed my memory, I hit the button to go back to my place. Pop! I was there.

And I was so impressed that I felt compelled to write a post about it. Which is what you're reading right now.

Unfortunately, Page Flip is only available on backlit devices; that is, the Kindle Fire and the various Kindle apps. But other than that, it's perfect. I feel like it's really levelled the playing field between print books and ebooks. Now they just need to make our devices smell like paper, and they'll have it perfect.

Now, to finish up, let's have some pictures.




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Have you tried Kindle's new #pageflip feature? @EllieFirestone1 shares her experience. [Click to Tweet]

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