EduKindle

If you really want to get around the content on your Kindle, the “Back” button is key. It isn’t talked about a lot, but there is a big difference between going “back” and going to the “previous page.” Kindle Tips and Troubleshooting at Amazon tells us this much:

Back vs. Prev Page: When you are reading books, periodicals and personal documents, the Next Page and Prev Page buttons take you forward and backward within the content. The Back button is like the back button on your web browser and allows you to retrace your steps on Kindle. For example, you can follow a link in a book and then use the Back button to return to your place. Or, you can start in the Front Page section of a newspaper, follow a link to an article, read that article and hit the Back button to go back to the Front Page.

I think about the way I experience the “back” button a bit differently. It seems to be to be the most useful to think of pressing the back button as “undoing” your last click of the scroll wheel. The button takes you back to your last selection using the scroll wheel, not the page flippers.

And maybe the most important thing to understand about the back button, bar none, is that, unlike your web browser, there is no “forward” button on the Kindle. It doesn’t exist. So once you hit the back button, you have to re-navigate yourself all the way back to where you were in your content–the newspaper, for example, or the book, or whatever. Sometimes, this is darned inconvenient.

So, you can make the Kindle sing with the flippers, the menu key, and the back button, but if that right thumb twitches at the wrong moment, all you can do is curse under your breath and start over again in finding that spot in the book that you just left.

One of the little known ways to get around the Kindle, especially if you are reading a large document, is to use the Enhanced Progress Bar. (Neat, huh?) So, how to do this?

1. Roll the scroll wheel over the Progress Bar (that line of dots across the bottom of the screen) and click. The rest of the screen grays out (after a Kindle-like pause–hang on, be patient, it will happen) and a box appears at the top with instructions on how to navigate bookmarks).

2. You will see something like this (without the labels, of course), known as the “Enhanced Progress Bar”:

You current location in the book is indicated by the “hollow” pointer, and any bookmarks that you have set are indicated by the “filled” or black markers.

3. What we are interested in right now are the number buttons that appear as images below the dots. These correspond to the number keys on the Kindle keyboard, and allow you to navigate through the book by pressing those number keys. Each key represents ten percent of the text, so if you push the “5″ key, you should jump halfway through the book.

Since the Kindle does not offer a “Go to End” on the menu bar (as it does a “Go to Beginning” option), using the Enhanced Progress Bar to jump to the end by hitting the “0″ key is quite handy, especially if you are looking for the index or endnotes.

4. Once you have pushed the number key of your choice to jump to a different spot in the book, you will see the text change but stayed “grayed out.” To start reading again, just roll the scroll wheel off the Progress Bar and, voila!, the text returns to reading mode.

5. To return to your earlier “current” position, just hit the “Back” button on the lower east side of the Kindle.

Stay tuned for more tips in this series on Kindle Navigation.