iOS Kindle App Improvements: 3 New Features for the Power Reader

As an avid user of the Kindle app on my iPad, it is always exciting when Amazon releases new versions of their Kindle app with new and improved features. I currently use Kindle for the iPad more than any other app because my reading habits. Recently Amazon released a newer version of their iOS Kindle app with three new features that clearly improve the app's functionality.

Multi-Color Highlight Feature

Users of the iOS Kindle app can now highlight their favorite passages with four different colors. This makes categorizing highlights possible, and these highlights do sync across devices. For those educators using Kindle e-books in their classrooms and for graduate school, this feature makes highlighting much more useful as an active reading strategy.

Multi-Color Highlight Selection Bar

X-Ray for Books

When Amazon updated the Kindle app to 3.5, it included a feature called X-Ray for text books. This feature captures and defines the most important terms found in a book uing Shelfari and Wikipedia. In a word, it provides an instant glossary of key concepts at the click of a button. With this Kindle app upgrade, non-text books in English are now included in the X-Ray feature.

X-Ray Page in Kindle App

Book End Feature

This feature page pops up when you have read the last page of the Kindle book. It allows you to review with book rating, type book review text and share your review on Twitter and Facebook. Those who like to write reviews of their books no longer have to log in to their web browser to write those reviews. It's a great way to start a conversation about the books you read.

Book End Page in Kindle iOS App

The new version of the Kindle iOS app adds more functionality with this latest update.

Using the New "Send to Kindle" App to Read Any Files on Your Kindle or iPad

Amazon now offers Kindle users still another tool that makes using a Kindle even more functional. They now offer a "Send to Kindle" app that lets users upload any document to their Kindle. This means users no longer have to read those lengthy MS Word and PDF documents from a PC. Users can add functionality by installing this simple application to their PC. 

Once installed, Send to Kindle Shows up like a printer. Simply select it as your printer, and a dialogue box appears and users, like myself, who have multiple Kindles  and an iPad, can choose which device to send the file to. Once uploaded, users can read that document on either of the devices.  

There are any number of reasons to install this app if you are a Kindle user. You can upload journal articles, school improvement plans, and entire PDF reports. Where were these kinds of tools when I was in college?

To download the Send to Kindle app, check out The Send to Kindle Web Site.  Chrome users might want to download the Send to Kindle Extension for their browser too, which I wrote about here last month.

Send to Kindle App Interface