Amazon Kindle Touch review

SEE INTO YOUR BOOK WITH X-RAY

A new feature on the Kindle Touch, which is currently unavailable for the basic Kindle, is X-Ray. This provides a snapshot of an entire book, so you can quickly find common terms that are repeated within it. X-Ray will bring up all such terms in order of how often they appear – either on that page, in that chapter, or in the book as a whole. It provides a visual reference, in the form of a bar, of that term’s distribution throughout the book, and where appropriate tags on a basic Wikipedia entry for the term too.

For example, when reading a reference book, such as The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (Complete), you bring up the menu bar by tapping at the top of the screen. Then you select X-ray and it will show you a list of all the common terms on that page. Pressing the chapter and book tabs lengthens that list to include further terms in those selections – Leonardo da Vinci stays at the top of the list as it’s the most common term in the whole book. Tap any option, in this case Florence, and it brings up a Wikipedia definition, and below that snippets of every appearance in the book.

Here you can see the distribution of common words across the whole book

For a reference book it’s very handy to see where particular terms appear, and even for fictional books it can help to get a bit of background on the setting or period. It’s also very useful for finding where a particular character was first introduced, when you can’t recall who they are, or what they look like, later on in the book.

You can bring up brief Wikipedia definitions of many terms

The X-ray information isn’t available for every book at present, but Amazon is working on cataloguing them as we speak. We found that most popular reads had the X-Ray data. The information is downloaded with the book itself, including the Wikipedia snippets, so you don’t need an internet connection to use it. It’s one of those handy features that some will swear by, but many more will rarely, if ever, use. It’s a great feature none-the-less and we hope it will be retrofitted into the basic Amazon Kindle in the future.