Amazon’s New "Page Flip" Feature for Kindle is like a Virtual Forefinger in an eBook
The ability to hold your place with a forefinger or bookmark while quickly flipping around the pages of a book is one of the few functional advantages paper books have over ebooks – or rather, it was.
On Tuesday Amazon introduced a new navigation feature for Kindle platform called Page Flip.
With Page Flip, readers can easily flip back and forth between pages in an ebook to reference different parts of the book while they read. Their original location will be saved, enabling them to quickly jump to the back of a book to check a map or glossary and then return to the story.
As any Kindle user could tell you, the Kindle platform already had a feature like this where you could flip through a comic book. Also, the Kindle ereader already let you push the page you’re reading to the background and flip around inside a book, but the new Page Flip feature improves upon that feature.
With Page Flip you can flip through nine thumbnails of page images at a time. Check it out in this GIF:
As you can see in the GIF, the bottom menu bar has a scroll bar and two buttons for the two different flipping features. The one on the left is for the old feature, while the button on the right is for Page Flip.
“As an author, I love knowing that my work is presented with fluid clarity, freeing my readers from the page shuffling that can cloud and spoil the narrative,” said Laura Hillenbrand, best-selling author of Unbroken. “With Page Flip, books become vastly more accessible, navigable, interactive, and enthralling. As a ravenous reader and scholar, I savor the ease with which Page Flip allows me to keep thumbnails of maps and diagrams, my notes and highlighted passages, and bookmarked pages before me as I read, so that all I wish to see is accessible with the tap of a finger and my focus never has to leave the storytelling.”
You can find more info at Amazon.
Amazon is rolling Page Flip out to all its apps in the next few weeks, and it will be coming to the Paperwhite, 2014 basic Kindle, Voyage, and Oasis as a firmware update.
From what Amazon is saying on its site, this is a feature of the Kindle ebook format, and not a software feature. So it won’t work with sideloaded ebooks right away, nor even with all ebooks sold in the Kindle store.
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