If you’re lucky enough to own one of Amazon’s 11th- or 12th-gen Kindle e-readers, you’ll be treated to the v5.18.5 patch, first spotted by GoodEReader. Everyone else? Well, you’ll just have to wait — assuming Kindle ever bothers updating its older, or differently-shaped e-readers with the change. The additions, apart from the inclusion of the Kindle Assistive Reader, are all fairly basic quality-of-life changes that could be easily implemented.
Amazon’s taking reading seriously again
Yeah, you might be able to adjust the font and size of the book you’re currently reading, but what about the Kindle UI itself? You’d think that a product that takes reading quite this seriously would have thought of allowing users to adjust the font size outside of their eBooks sooner, but here we are. Now you can with the v5.18.5 by simply visiting your e-reader’s ‘Screen and Brightness’ tab in the settings.
Back to inside the book, the update also allows users to adjust the spacing between words, paragraphs, and even characters. Most users likely won’t fiddle with the default settings, but folks who may have dyslexia may appreciate some extra-large spacing. You can adjust these by hitting the ‘Aa’ settings while reading.
Read More: Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2024) review – Reading just enough into it
Easily the biggest addition is also the one that will likely never come to Amazon’s older e-readers. Kindle Assistive Reader was first released a little over a month ago before Amazon disabled it to squash out a few bugs. It’s now back, and it’s ready to start reading your books to you in a natural-sounding voice, while highlighting the text in real-time. Newer Kindles have ditched the speaker entirely, so you’ll need a pair of bluetooth headphones.
Finally, users can lock the orientation of their Kindle to stop it from moving around constantly as they re-adjust in bed or place it down on the bathroom’s cold tiles as they finish up on the porcelain throne.
