Get the Most Out of Your Kindle IOS App
The Kindle app, of course, lets you read your Amazon-purchased e-books, but it has other useful features that you might not have known about. Things like creating flashcards to help you learn, importing free classics to read, and saving articles for offline reading.
Explore terms and key concepts with flashcards
If you’re like me and constantly highlight passages in your Kindle books and take notes in specific sections, you can create flashcards out of them for further study. This is how it works:
- Make a selection by sliding your finger over the text. You can also take a note by pressing and holding the text to bring up the menu and then tapping the note icon. Do this as many times as you like throughout the book.
- Tap the top of the screen.
- Tap the hamburger drop-down menu on the left.
- Click Cards.
- Click on the plus sign, then select New Deck From Notebook.
- Customize what you want to see in the deck of cards (all items, only notes, only selection, etc.), then click Create.
- Name your deck of cards and click Save.
That’s all! You can now go to the cards page and scroll through your deck. You can also edit your decks from there if you want to add more cards or add to existing cards. For example, Highlights only create one-sided cards, so you can go in and add something on the other side of each card to make it look more like a quiz. However, flashcards that have nothing but the highlights can still be a good way to quickly see what stood out in the book for you.
You can also do this with the Amazon Kindle X-Ray, a feature that lets you explore the content of your books deeper. With a couple of taps, you can see all the passages in the book that cover specific concepts, characters or locations. You can then quickly create decks of cards with these items .
Search for definitions, translations and Wikipedia pages
If you see an unfamiliar word, phrase that you can translate, or a person, place, or thing that you don’t know, the Kindle app makes it easy to find. Just touch a word and hold for a while. A pop-up menu will appear that you can use to highlight a word or take notes, but below you will see a window called Dictionary. As soon as you load the dictionary by clicking the blue arrow, you will immediately be given the definitions of the words you press and hold.
If you swipe left on this window, you will see the Wikipedia window. Here you can read a short description of what that element is, and if you want to know more, you can click on the link that will take you to the full Wikipedia page. Scroll again and you will see the Translator window. Here you can select the language for translating the word. For example, if you see a word in German, it will automatically set German as the source language, and then you can set the translation to English. It is a useful tool for reading books containing many non-English words, and is especially handy for those who still understand English and are constantly obsessed with unfamiliar words.
Make digital magazines easier to read
Amazon Prime subscribers get access to free digital magazines every month through Prime Reading . The problem is, reading digital magazines on your iPhone isn’t the best option. The text is too small, the pictures are too big, and this is just a big problem. Fortunately, there is a simple solution. Just tap anywhere in the story to open the view options, then tap the text view icon at the top right corner (it looks like a piece of paper with a lettering on it).
Use Send to Kindle to save web articles for offline reading
The Kindle app can also be used as a web cropping tool , similar to apps like Instapaper and Pocket. When viewing a webpage in Safari:
- Tap the Share icon (square with an up arrow).
- Scroll through the app icons until you see Send to Kindle.
- Click on it and it will send the text to your Kindle library.
Open the Kindle app and you’ll see it pop up relatively quickly. Tap it to save it for offline reading and go about your business.
If that doesn’t work, you can always just send the webpage to your Kindle’s email address. Yes, he has his own email. Go to your Kindle Library, tap More, then tap Settings. You should see your “Email to Send to Kindle” at the top. In the same way, you can send other documents to the Kindle, including Word files, images, PDFs, and more.
Fill your Kindle library with free classics
If you’re looking for something free to read, there are always classics that are in the public domain right now. On your iPhone or iPad, go to the Project Gutenberg mobile site , find the book you want to read, tap the Kindle link, and select Open with Kindle. That’s it – it should immediately load into your Kindle app and be ready to read. Other websites also have book collections such as Internet Archive , Europeana, and DPLA . Just make sure you choose the correct format for your books. Look for “mobi” or “prc” files. PDFs will work as well, but you have the same viewing options with them.