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Kindle 3 Shortcuts, Hot Keys, and Hidden Features

Posted on August 29th, 2010 by Nathan

For whatever reason, Amazon doesn’t mention most of these Kindle 3 shortcuts and keyboard hot keys in the Kindle user guide.

The coolest hidden feature is the screenshot. The files get saved to the Kindle in .PNG format. Just plug the Kindle 3 in to your computer with the USB cable and open up the documents folder to find them.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to figure out any shortcuts for the Kindle’s new web browser. It would be cool to be able to open the bookmarks menu and be able to use hot keys for zooming in and out, but so far nothing seems to work. At least it works great for downloading free Kindle ebooks.

Please post any other Kindle 3 shortcuts, hot keys, and hidden features that you may happen to find.

Kindle 3 Shortcuts: General

alt + shift + G = screenshot
alt + G = screen refresh
shift + alt + m = play minesweeper (from homescreen)
alt + home = Kindle Store
alt + top row of letters on keyboard = numbers 1-9
hit menu to check the time
hit menu on homescreen to see available memory
turn off kindle 3 by pressing and holding the power slide for 7 seconds
reset the kindle by pressing and holding the power slide for 15 seconds (restart is also in settings then menu)
change primary dictionary by going to settings then menu

Kindle 3 Hot Keys While Reading

alt + B = add and remove bookmarks
right arrow on nav controller = skip to next chapter
left arrow on nav controller = skip to previous chapter

Text-to-Speech

shift + Sym = Turn text to speech on and off
back turns off text to speech
spacebar pauses text to speech
set cursor down the page to start text to speech from there

Music Controls

alt + space = turn music on and off
alt + f = skip to next track

Kindle 3 Image Viewer

Like the earlier Kindles, the Kindle 3 has a hidden image viewer. It really doesn’t serve much purpose and doesn’t work all that great, but here are the steps needed to set up the Image Viewer if you want to try it.

Plug the Kindle 3 into your computer with the USB cable.
Open the Kindle 3 as if you were adding ebooks to it and create a new folder among the other folders, not inside one of the other folders, and name it “pictures”.
Inside the “pictures” folder, create another folder to add the images into. Adding images directly in the “pictures” folder will not work. You can create multiple folders to have different collections if you want.
Safely unplug the Kindle from your computer and then tap alt + z on the homescreen to add the newly created folders to the book list. Click on the folder and the Image Viewer will launch.