Amazon unveiled a new way to navigate Kindle ebooks today that is going to be soon available on Kindle apps, Kindle ereaders, and Fire tablets.
The new feature is called Page Flip. It makes it easier to navigate and jump around parts of an ebook without loosing your place.
You can zoom out to get a bird’s eye view of an ebook to easily find images, maps, tables, your added bookmarks and highlights, etc.
It’s laid out so that each page has a thumbnail image that automatically adjusts as you change font and margin settings.
Here’s more from the press release:
Page Flip automatically saves the page you’re reading in a book, pinning it to the side of your screen for easy navigation. Flip back and forth in a book with confidence, knowing you can instantly jump back to reading with a simple tap of your pinned page.
The new Page Flip feature will be added with upcoming software updates for Kindle ereaders, Fire tablets and the Kindle apps for iOS and Android.
Keep an eye on the official Software Updates page at Amazon for the new software download links for Kindle ereaders and Fire tablets if you want to install the update manually instead of waiting for the automatic update. As of this writing the pages haven’t been updated yet; they’re still showing the last software updates.
There’s also this page at Amazon with more info and some screenshots showing the Page Flip feature in action.
This page http://www.amazon.com/pageflip says ebooks have to be “Page Flip: Enabled”. I wonder if older gen ereaders will get Page Flip software updates, and if this will be available on Overdrive library ebooks.
Kindle of iOS has been updated on my iPad and the new Page Flip feature is pretty sweet. Captain Blood, which was this month’s free ebook, has Page Flip enabled, as does my first novel (though not my others books as yet), so the process is automatic. If Page Flip is enabled it is indicated on the product page near the top of the page beneath the description, rather than in the Product Details section further down.
There are essentially two modes of browsing through the content, one by scrolling horizontally through the linear sequence of pages (left-right), or via thumbnail mode, which produces a grid (ala iBooks) that you scroll through vertically. Tapping on any page take you there while creating a small icon of your previous page so that you can return to it with a tap. Once you do that though, it also creates a new icon for the page you just returned from, thereby allowing you to flip back and forth between the two with a single tap. Very useful for indexes, maps, etc.
Presumably since it’s a software feature it should eventually be available for all titles. Seems to be available currently only for reflowing ebooks, as I can’t find any fixed layouts with the feature enabled. Hopefully that’s just temporary.