Story by
Matthew Panzarino
Matthew Panzarino was Managing Editor at TNW. He's no longer with the company, but you can follow him on Twitter. Matthew Panzarino was Managing Editor at TNW. He's no longer with the company, but you can follow him on Twitter.
A new update has been rolled out for the $79 Kindle, bringing a host of improvements including extended parental controls, a higher-contrast font and support for Amazon’s Kindle Format 8 book format.
The update is available for direct download now from Amazon, but will also roll out over Wi-Fi to Kindles ‘in the coming weeks’.
The higher contrast display mode will come from an improved reading font that Amazon calls ‘crisper’. There are also extended Parental Controls that allow you to toggle access to the Experimental Web Browser. Archived Items and the Kindle Store.
The format support of the device has been beefed up to allow it to support complex layouts using Amazon’s Kindle Format 8 as well. This means that books with Kindle Text Pop-Up and Kindle Panel View (used for reading comic books) are now supported and will start to show up in the store soon.
There will also be a new collection called Dictionaries that will house all of the documents of those types in your Home and Archived folders. Amazon has also bumped up table and image viewing on some titles.
You can download the update from Amazon here or just wait until it rolls out to your device.
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