Tap tap tap

I discovered quite a few features in the Kindle app on iPhone after using it for several hours. I thought a quick post to share these with others will be a good idea.

Everything here is really obvious and if you use the app for any amount of time you will stumble upon these things. This might prove useful for people who are just getting started though.

  1. Stop rotation: Screen rotation is a really cool feature, but if you are reading in bed, and twist and turn often, this can become a nuisance. Fortunately there is a way to lock the screen setting so that it doesn’t rotate. Tap gently on the bottom right of the screen, and a little padlock will appear. If you tap on this padlock – it will prevent your screen from rotating. No matter what you do, the screen will not rotate. You can do the same thing to unlock the screen and let it rotate.
  2. Rotate on a flat surface: I have noticed that if you keep the phone on a flat surface like a table and then rotate it – the screen doesn’t rotate. To get around this, you can lock the screen the way you want (using the idea in first step), and then read it on a flat surface.
  3. Turn pages without flicking: You need to flick the screen to go to the next page on the iPhone. If you are in the middle of a book and have to do it several times in a minute – you start looking for alternates. The alternate to flicking is a gentle tap on the right side of the screen to move forward, or on the left side of screen to move backwards. The area on which it works is probably just 10% of the screen (either side). I say gentle tap because if your touch is not light, then the whole thing with the title of the book and the bottom bar which shows you the option to refresh, increase font etc. appears.
  4. Bookmark a page: A gentle tap on the top right of the screen creates a bookmark. This is quite useful if you are bookmarking several pages, as it saves the trouble of going to the title bar every time.
  5. Location drives me nuts: There are no page numbers on the app, instead there is something called a “Location”, and it’s a range. So a particular screen might say – Location 7757 – 7761. This is done because you can change the text size and then there would be a different location. What I do is look at the farthest location in the book before beginning to read it. Then when I am reading — I get an idea of how much of the book is left by looking at the current location, and doing a little math in my head. But, really, there has to be a better way to do this. Here is a useful thread explaining this and complaining about it too.
  6. Broken words: I came across quite a few broken words in the book. By broken words, I mean you will see a word with a space between the characters, like this: “Spac e”. If you rotate the screen, that word appears without a space sometimes, but not always. That leads me to believe the broken words are a result to accommodate different views and font sizes. It’s a very annoying thing, but knowing what’s causing it makes it a little less annoying. I don’t know if there is anything you could do about the broken words though, apart from reading the real book itself.

These were some things that helped me improve my reading experience with the Kindle app. It is a really useful app to have if you already have an iPhone, and it has easily become my most often used app on the phone.

3 thoughts on “Tap tap tap”

  1. great tips. So far I love the Kindle app on my iPod Touch, and I downloaded the PC version, but haven’t used it much yet. Still, it’s nice to have options. 🙂

    1. I am using the PC version more than the phone one now. It helps to have both. I see that there are some problems in syncing up, and it doesn’t always sync up the last read page. I have not been able to narrow down the problem yet, but there is something there…..

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *