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.
Amazon Kindle Motto: Fix it till it breaks.
With constant changes to the interface they make this very confusing for older adults. My aunt is 91 years old and reads every day. She lives 5 hours away and uses my Kindle Unlimited to pick out what she wants to read. All the constant changes and new ways of doing something that was easy to learn before makes it harder for her to enjoy her Kindle and since we don’t use our Kindles it makes it harder to troubleshoot any problems she has understanding any changes. I wish they would leave the library, fonts, dictionaries alone. I gave up using my Kindle because I was tired of how much they were complicating the library and home screens. Kobo is much easier to see your books and to download them to your device. I hope Kobo never gives up that “download all” button and I had always wished Amazon would adopt that capability.
A few days ago, I noticed the changes (there are also changes related to how individual and global book annotations are shared via email, among other things). Personally, I haven’t had any problems with the dictionary on any of my devices, and I don’t dislike the new interface, but the changes are sure to bother many people (if only because they are different from what you are used to seeing).
I noticed the change last week. My dictionary is fine, but I dislike the new interface and how small it is. I don’t use the large interface but could the new UI get any smaller? Come on.
Brilliant thanks!. I had this dictionary problem and now fixed with your suggestions.
I gotta ask in all seriousness: why are you here? Why post that screed? You aren’t going to convince anyone of anything and there are lots of other places to rant.
I agree with you regarding Kindles. That is why I switched happily to Kobo. Is there a perfect ereader out there? No. Does Kobo have flaws? Yes. But Kobo ‘s flaws are minor compared to Kindle. Kobo is more reader friendly and less cluttered than Amazon. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and their own likes and dislikes. I appreciate balanced opinions and weigh positive comments against negative comments before making up my mind about what purchases I am going to make. I appreciate both Nathan’s views and RHEL’s. They both have merit and are both helpful.
RHEL is no longer welcome to post here; the comments have been deleted. I don’t mind if people disagree with me in a respectful manner, but the line was crossed too many times over the past few months with that weird vendetta against Kindles. Some people just can’t understand when others have a different opinion than them, or don’t experience the same issues they do. I clearly don’t have a problem criticising Kindles and I wish we had more alternatives, but I’m not going to tolerate being called a shill whenever I have something positive to say about Kindles. It’s ridiculous. It’s not like we have a lot of options to choose from when it comes to ereaders. Kindles are the most popular brand by a wide margin so they’re obviously going to garner more coverage. I will admit that I do prefer using the latest Kindle Paperwhite more than Kobos at this point in time since Kobo refuses to release any new BW ereaders. I can tolerate some software issues, but I can’t make a new Libra BW appear out of nothing, and I’m really just not a big fan of color E Ink.
I would rather have honest and straight forward answers and opinions no matter whether they trod hard on someone)s toes or not than rosy lies that cause you to waste your money only to be disappointed with the truth, I have disagreed with you sometimes but mostly your articles have helped me find out about things I could not have found out on my own. I love electronics and this blog is always my first open in the morning. Thank you so much.
Being called stupid and ignorant for preferring Kindle over other brands is really going too far. Some people do nothing but fight their own ghosts.
Can’t we all just be friendly ?
There’s a person that doesn’t like Nooks at all on mobilereads. My theory is Nooks did them dirty somehow. They’ll tell me their problems with the Nook (software and formatting-the usual points of contention). None of that bothers me and they just cant understand it. They don’t lambaste me though so that’s appreciated.
I have stopped updating my Kindles that have the new user interface because I think the updates make the interface worse and worse.
Thanks for this post, I had this issue on one of my kindles and this was helpful. My other problem is the option to open the dictionary seems to have vanished entirely. I’m curious if you have experienced this as well or may know a workaround.
I also observe this and have not found a workaround. This is pretty inconvenient for finding related words.
This is why I feel updates should be optional and not automatic. Or if they are automatic let people uninstall problematic updates and install previous updates that they like the look of or that don’t break things.
Without my doing, my dictionary was updated to a new version about a week ago. I use both the American and British English – I’m an American teaching Engiish in Germany, so I need both of them. The only problem with the update is that I cannot enter a word to search for; I can see only the definitions of words that are in the given text. I often encounter a word in the definition, which I would like to further investigate, but this is no longer possible. The complete dictionary to “page” through is not available, so if I want further information that appears in a definition, I am out of luck. Does anyone know how to access the main dictionary and not just the individual definitions? An additional problem that even the previous version had was to offer a definition with a raised digit (e.g., 1) after the headword, signaling that this is the first of “X” number of meanings, but often OUP withholds the additional meanings so that one is forced to access the dictionary, but, as I said, this is also inhibited.
I had the same problem recently with my 11th Generation Kindle Paperwhite. After speaking to Customer Services and trying a Kindle store download, soft/hard restart, refreshing wifi and a data hotspot, the only thing that worked for me was a full factory reset (I have two Kindles, so too many devices wasn’t a problem for me). The Oxford Dictionary of English then downloaded immediately, and the Kindle actually feels faster now too! I then managed to re-download 100 books in record time, and they were indexed very quickly. The new dictionary (and highlight) interface feels like a big step backwards for accessibility though, it was much better before.