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Is Amazon Ever Going to Add Immersion Reading to Kindles?

December 29, 2020 by Nathan 7 Comments

Kindle Paperwhite

Ever since Amazon brought audiobook support back to Kindles, people often ask if it’s possible to read a Kindle ebook while listening to the audiobook being read aloud.

Amazon calls this Immersion Reading, and it’s a feature that’s been available on Kindle apps and Fire tablets for a long time.

With Immersion Reading enabled, it will highlight the words in the Kindle ebook in sync with the audiobook as it’s read aloud. This can be a very useful feature for kids learning to read or if you’re trying to learn a new language.

So why don’t Kindles support this feature?

I used to think it was because E Ink screens refresh to slowly to stay in time with the audiobook, but I’ve tried Immersion Reading with Onyx’s ereaders using the Kindle app and it works fine. The highlighting keeps up without a problem, especially when using Onyx’s speed mode refresh setting.

The added darkness of the highlight does make it a bit harder to read the text, but they could just make it use underlines instead of highlighting the whole word and it would work well enough to be useful.

Even if they don’t want to add highlighting or underlines they could at least make it so you can read the Kindle ebook while the audiobook is playing in the background. Instead they force you to look at the audiobook player and make it impossible to read while listening unless you use a separate device. This makes no sense.

The bottom line is Kindles could support Immersion Reading if Amazon wanted them to. E Ink screens have some limitations but they could still make it work.

Filed Under: Amazon Kindle

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Laura says

    December 29, 2020 at 9:11 am

    I would love to be able to read along with audio books on my Kindle Oasis without needing to use a second device. I think I would prefer no highlighting.

    Reply
  2. Charles Kemp says

    December 29, 2020 at 10:18 am

    As someone that is hard of hearing, and using hearing aids, I would love to read along with also hearing the books. I truly believe this would help me with my word recognition.

    Reply
  3. Steve H says

    December 29, 2020 at 1:16 pm

    I thought they did have this on the Kindle Touch model..back several years ago.

    Reply
  4. J.C. says

    December 29, 2020 at 6:47 pm

    Probably not, since it’ll be a battery hog and they wouldn’t want to encourage such thing on a slow charging kindle.

    Reply
  5. Kevin says

    December 29, 2020 at 7:06 pm

    I guess I can’t really knock it until I try it but I’m old school so I don’t really see the point in immersion reading :

    1.) It would be possible on my Onyx Boox poke 3 but my poke 3 already has inferior battery life compared to my Kobo Libra so this seems like a really dumb idea.

    2.) I think it makes more sense to read to some cerebral old school Baroque music than to read while having the text pronounced to me via audio at the sametime. Preferably the music would be coming from another device. In fact I disabled or uninstalled the music function on my Onyx via the adb linux command line toolset.

    “Immersion reading” sounds like a fad but I again I have not tried it.

    I don’t own an Amazon kindle but I have used the Amazon kindle app on my Onyx and it works surprisingly well but adding the audio part to it would just be a no go battery killer IMHO.

    Reply
  6. Rodrigo says

    December 29, 2020 at 7:57 pm

    Could it be that the kindles’s OS isn’t multi-tasking so it can’t do both things at the same time?

    Reply
  7. Chris says

    December 30, 2020 at 8:00 am

    Maybe it’s just me, but IMO this has to be a purposeful decision on Amazon’s part, and one that goes beyond they just don’t want to. Apart from pointing out the obvious differences of course, IMO this is one way for Amazon to differentiate the Fire, the app and the e-ink Kindles in its advertising and PR.

    Of course it could also very well be that Amazon just makes very odd decisions sometimes. In a somewhat related example to the immersion reading issue you point out in this post, I I still don’t understand why a Kindle e-book doesn’t sync with the Audible version unless I purchase the Kindle book first. If I use my monthly Audible credit to get the audio version and then decide I want to purchase the e-book to read on my Kindle, I’ve basically got to finish listening to a chapter on Audible to have much hope of figuring out where I should be in the e-book.

    Reply

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