It’s time to bring out the pitchforks and torches. Amazon is changing the appearance of some parts of the user interface on Kindles once again, and people aren’t going to like it.
The update brings a new look to the table of contents menu, and they’re also changing the panel that pops up when you lookup words in the dictionary and Wikipedia. The highlighting menu looks different now too, but it seems to work the same, except they removed the search option and moved it to the window that pops up for the dictionary.
The problem I encountered after these changes suddenly appeared out of nowhere on my Kindle Paperwhite is the dictionary wouldn’t work. When selecting a word to bring up the definition, this is what appeared in the dictionary section:
“There are no dictionaries on your device. To find a dictionary to download, tap on ‘Dictionaries’ in your Library.”
That’s not exactly convenient; why didn’t the dictionary download automatically like usual? I went to the library and tried to find the missing dictionary as directed, but with one long list of hundreds of books I obviously couldn’t find it, and I wasn’t going to scroll through the entire list 5 books at a time.
So I ran a search for “dictionary” and it brought up the Oxford Dictionary of English. I tried to download it, but it just said “queued” and never downloaded. I tried restarting the Kindle and it still did the same thing.
I finally got the dictionary to work by going to Amazon’s website and searching for the Oxford Dictionary from the content page on my account. I then tried to deliver it to my Paperwhite from there, but it made me delete it from one of my other Kindles first. Apparently the dictionary can only be download to six Kindles at a time now, expect on my account it will only let me select five for some reason. Either way, I’ve never encountered that issue before with Kindle dictionaries.
Most people probably don’t have that many Kindles registered to their account, but if you have five or more Kindles you might encounter this problem now too. I think it’s time to start selling off some of my old Kindles…
After doing that the Oxford Dictionary showed up as being downloaded on my Kindle and then the dictionary lookup feature worked after that. But it showed a different “New Oxford American Dictionary” at the bottom of the window. I selected it and had the option to switch to the “Oxford Dictionary of English”, but after selecting it the other dictionary has now disappeared. If I open a different book it reappears as the default, but it’s still missing from the book where I switched to the other dictionary. Great work, Amazon, another buggy update to change something that worked perfectly fine before!
My Kindle Paperwhite is running the latest 5.18.6 software that was released exactly one month ago. I updated it right away, but these changes didn’t appear until today.
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