How to Use Amazon Kindle 2 - Advanced Reading Tips

The Amazon Kindle 2 does much more than just display pages for you to read. As it's a smart device, you can get dictionary definitions of words, place virtual dog-ears on pages you want to refer back to, search for instances of a word or phrase, highlight text and write your own notes.

Hi! This is Andrew Moore Crispin with your butterscotch.com tutorial series on using you Amazon Kindle 2nd Generation. This is Part 5: Advanced Reading. Now you can see here on the home screen, we have bicycle diaries selected. We’ll open that up—we’ll be using this book as our example. Now you can see here on this page, we can choose to bring up a cursor by simply moving the thumbstick, as soon as you move the thumbstick, the cursor will appear and will start to move around the page. Now to create a highlight, something that we want to refer back to later, all we need to do is put the cursor where we wish to start our highlight. In this case, we’re going to say we’re going to want to highlight there—not very pedestrian friendly either. We’ll click in, we’ll click the thumbstick in, now you see the cursor has changed configuration, it’s now Italic, and that means we’ve entered highlighting mode. We can press left or right on the thumbstick to select passages, you’ll see that it moves one word at a time—so they’re not very pedestrian friendly either, and it includes punctuation. Now we have to do is click the thumbstick again, to finish highlighting, now it’s added our highlight. We can also can also choose to add a note to our highlight by simply moving the cursor to where we want the note to be, in this case we’re going to make mention of the fact of this passage here saying they’re not very pedestrian friendly either. And all we have to do—you can see here, begin typing to create a note. So we’re going to put it here, if we put it within the highlight, it will actually associate the note with the highlight. Now I’m going to say—just saying that some cities aren’t very pedestrian friendly which as a pedestrian, I know it all to be true, so we’ll say no kidding. Now we can choose to use the thumbstick, we can save our note which is the default option, we can clear it and start again or cancel and not save our note—in this case, we’ll choose to save it. So you can see it’s associated a header note with our passage that we had highlighted at the time. To remove this note, we can just hit the delete key and the note is gone. To remove a highlight, we just move into the highlight, press the delete key and our highlights disappeared too. Now let’s take a look at adding a bookmark. Anytime we’re reading a passage in a book—let’s go to another page, we can choose—oh I like that picture, let’s say we want to bookmark this page, we hit the menu key. Now you can see here, one of the options is add a bookmark and you literally just have to select it with a thumbstick and press the cursor key in. You can see here, the page has become dogeared denoting that we have a bookmark on this page. If we go into the menu again, it’s sensitive—contact sensitive that is to know that we do have a bookmark and as if we want to delete a bookmark instead of adding a bookmark. Let’s have a look at navigating through a book jumping multiple pages rather than leaping through each page by pressing next and previous page, hit the menu key. We can go to the cover, we can to the table of contents, we can jump to the beginning of the book or we can to a specific location. Now this is an interesting feature, sync to – this page red. As you may know, the Kindle has an I-Phone application as well as a desktop computer application. Using the wireless connection within the Kindle, it will actually sync up and say ‘okay, you read this part on your I-Phone and this part of your book on the PC, so now, obviously you’ve already read that stuff, I’m going to jump you to the page that you most recently read’. So we’ll do that here, sync to – this page read, it will take a couple of second and you need to note that the wireless connections needs to be on to do this, so you won’t be able it on—for example, and airplane. So now, it’s pulling up the data from the server and it’s going to hopefully jump us to the page that we were last reading so we can pick up where we left off. Let’s take a little bit of time here, maybe we’ll just cancel out of that—oh no, there we go. So that’s letting us know that the most recently read page was this and we read it at this time, we would like to go there now—say yes please. There we go, that was the last page we were reading. Let’s take a look at some of the other advanced reading functions here. We can choose to search within this book, so we can choose to do that by going into this menu or if we were within the book itself, we can just start typing on the keyboard to begin a search query. So let’s say we want to search for gears. Now you can see here, one of the options is find—we’ll just hover over, move the cursor over and select that or we can just hit enter and this function will be the one that’s performed. However, if you have internet connection in your country, the ability to get websites on the Kindle, you can also search the Wikipedia and Google, or in this case, you can search a dictionary which is bundled on any Kindle to see if you could get a definition of the word. Let’s say we want to jump to a page that contains the word gears, and click the thumbkey in. Now we can see here all the locations in the book that have the word gears in them. Now we can just navigate to the one that we think is the reference we’re looking to, click on the button and be taken to that page. One other neat feature, you see here that we have the cursor up again, anytime we navigate to a word, you can see that it will start to give us a definition, this is from the dictionary that’s built into the Kindle—so in this case, we’re going to get the definition of the word ‘clock’. Let’s say we didn’t know what the word ‘oblivious’ meant, we’re oblivious to the meaning of the word ‘oblivious’. We can navigate over to that and find out what the word ‘oblivious’ means. So that’s the look at some of the advanced reading function on your Amazon Kindle 2nd Generation. Remember, this is a multiple part series, and be sure to watch all the parts.