Kindle Paperwhite software update: An improvement

It’s been more than two years since I first reviewed Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite, my preferred source for reading on trips and at bedtime.

And at bedtime on trips, for that matter.

(I tell ya, one of the Kindle’s great advantages is its removal from the bedtime dynamic of that scratchy page-turning sound. How many marriages have been tested because one partner wanted to sleep and the other wanted to read a paper book or magazine or newspaper?)

Amazon promotional image

In the last few weeks, Amazon’s rolled out a software update for 6th and 7th Generation Kindles.

I recommend it. Here’s why:

* The new interface is cleaner, with a “Quick Actions” button providing easier access to most-used features like airplane mode, syncing and brightness.

* While I haven’t run benchmark tests, it feels snappier overall, even on my aging 2013 model.

The finally-functional Kindle
Web browser in “article mode”

* Best of all, Amazon’s curiously-named (still, after all these years) “Experimental Browser” seems at last to be somewhat functional. A broader variety of pages load without problem and — more important — the browser’s “article mode” (like “reader mode” in other browsers) also seems to work, producing simple-layout text that scrolls almost as responsively as Kindle-native books. For some reason, the company’s not bragging about this.

I still wish Amazon would allow ragged-right text justification.

Note: If your Kindle is full or almost full, you may not get the update automatically, as would normally happen. You may instead get an alert advising you to make more room on the device. You can instead download and install the update manually by connecting your Kindle to a personal computer.

If even that doesn’t work, you may want to reset the Kindle to factory specs and then reload your content.

That’s what I did, and it was worth the trouble.