One of Amazon’s flagship features, X-Ray for Books, has finally arrived in its iOS version. This is enormous as it’s one of the main reasons I love reading books on my Kindle and the Kindle Fire so much better than my iPad.
The X-Ray feature is one of the coolest selling points of the Kindle devices including e-ink and HD models. The ability to get a breakdown of characters on a page and where they appear in a book is super neat. Amazon calls it seeing the ‘bones of the book’.
In today’s update, Amazon brings that feature over to iOS devices. The X-Ray for Books feature gives you access to all the most important terms and concepts in a book. You can see things like characters, terms and more that appear throughout the book. This lets you reference things that may appear only briefly and see the relationships between the characters and places more easily. It’s really a lovely feature.
As I put it when Amazon launched X-Ray for Textbooks on iOS:
Here’s hoping that X-Ray extends to all Amazon shipped books on iOS at some point. It seems that it might weaken Amazon’s hardware position to do so, but since they’re primarily interested in getting conduits for their digital product out there to as many people as possible, it does make some sense to ensure that each of those conduits provides a strong experience.
Now it’s here for everyone, proving once again that Amazon has one of the most interesting product strategies in the business right now. It simply wants to provide the best experience possible for its customers. And those customers are simply anyone who purchases Kindle content, not just people who purchase Kindle hardware.
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