![]() (And don’t even try it on a smartphone!) It might make the iPad Pro a great color-magazine-reading platform, I suppose. Also in magazine mode, tapping at the bottom of the screen brings up a row of page thumbnails for easier page-flipping and navigation. This is helpful for seeing how two-page spreads look, but on a screen the size of the iPad Mini (or even the regular-sized iPad) it makes the text too small to read. When reading in magazine mode, viewing in portrait shows one page and in landscape shows two facing pages. You switch between them by double-tapping in the Android version, or using a mode selection switch at the top of the screen on iPad. Magazines can be read either in their PDF-like formatted version, or in a text-ebook-style “simple text” reading mode. Unlike scrolling, this was introduced to the Android version as well, and seems to work largely the same in both places. The Kindle app also introduced the new magazine format, which uses a version of the KFX ebook format to allow browsing magazines in the Kindle app. If you want to be able to move exactly one page forward with one tap, you have to turn scrolling off. ![]() You have to swipe exactly as far up as you want the text to move, or else “throw” it by swiping fast and releasing. ![]() One thing I don’t like as much about it is that there’s no way to page down exactly one screen’s worth with a single tap. In the books I’ve tried, the formatting seems to translate well enough to scrolling, with only a few minor bobbles here and there. This screenshot is from Ryk Spoor’s Princess Holy Aura and shows the dedication, section heading, and start of chapter all on the same screen, which are on three separate pages in page-flip mode. Once it’s enabled, and on books that can use it, the scrolling feature seems to work reasonably well. Why didn’t they just put that switch there by default, rather than require users to enable a buried setting option first? And being able to do nifty things like scrolling rather than flipping would give readers some incentive to buy the books from Amazon rather than somewhere else.Īnother oddity about the feature is that it has to be enabled from a settings screen several menu options deep-and then once it is enabled, there’s a switch on the font and margins control screen for compatible books that can be turned on and off. Presumably, it’s easier for Amazon to support some of these features in its devices and apps by building hooks for them into the file format itself-but on the other hand, apps like Marvin can scroll any book they can read. It didn’t work with MOBI-format ebooks that I made myself. ![]() Much like Amazon’s Page Flip feature that gives you a grid of multiple page thumbnails, this only seems to work with the new KFX-formatted ebooks. This means that people who prefer reading ebooks on a long scrolling window rather than flippable pages can now do so-as long as they’re reading an ebook they bought from Amazon. The other big feature, which David mentioned in his own post, is that the Kindle app now (partly) supports vertical scrolling. This means that someone could, at least in theory, read a Kindle ebook in half the screen while taking notes in the other half, much as the Onyx Boox Max 2 let you do with its own reading function. On devices that support iOS’s split-screen function, the Kindle can now display a book in half the screen, while some other app runs in the other half. The changes are interesting, and will probably be useful to some readers-though I’m not so sure they’d necessarily make the app useful for me.įirst of all, there’s one feature I couldn’t try out, because the Mini 2 is too old, but those with newer iPads can take advantage of it. In the last couple of months, the iOS Kindle app has received a couple of significant updates, so I dug out my old iPad Mini 2 to take a look. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |