I love a good surprise, like finding a $20 bill in last year’s jacket. Kindle updates are not always that. Despite their lack of fanfare, they can drastically reshape users’ reading experiences, sometimes for the better and sometimes not. As often as the updates deliver new features, they also bring bugs, break habits, and frustrate jailbreakers who’d rather stay frozen in time.
A few recent Kindle updates have genuinely earned my applause. Amazon gave us finer text controls with adjustable line and paragraph spacing that make reading feel less claustrophobic. Likewise, accessibility tweaks improved navigation for visually impaired users. A recent Kindle Scribe update delivered new pen tools and a sleeker sidebar for note-taking.