Friday, May 07, 2010

Kindle Skills

Originally posted May 7, 2010 by Cindy O'Neal

Search within a book
Take advantage of Kindle's search capabilities with books you need to refer to often. With the book open on your Kindle, type what you are looking for, then toggle the five-way switch to the word find, then press in on the 5-way switch. Depending on the words you used as your search term, you should have from one to many choices within just a few seconds. Toggle the 5-way switch to the one you want to see, then press in to view it. Use the back button to go back to the search results any time.

This is really handy if you have created a list of contacts or recipes, or any other kind of list. It doesn't matter how long the list is. Once it is on your Kindle, you can search it for specific words. Imagine just a few seconds to find someone's phone number, or the address and phone number of your doctor or dentist. Having a contact list on my Kindle has come in handy many times when I needed information quickly.

To each his own Search
Type what you are looking for and toggle the switch to:
  • find: searches the currently open book or document
  • my items: searches all books and documents currently on your Kindle
  • store: searches the Kindle store
  • google: takes you to the Internet for a Google search
  • wikipedia: Internet search in Wikipedia (internet encyclopedia)
  • dictionary: searches the dictionary on your Kindle
Remember: you can press the Back button to return to what you were doing any time.

New Kindle software update news
One of the new features we can expect on our Kindles once they are updated (through the magic of Whispernet and Amazon - version 2.5 sometime in May) is the ability to password protect it when you aren't using it. That will certainly be valuable to me, since I like to keep my special passwords file on my Kindle and it will be nice to know if I lose it (Heaven forbid), someone won't be able to view any of my books, much less my special file. So far, I always know where my Kindle is and if the unthinkable should happen, any thief would have to pry my Kindle from my cold dead hands.