The Kindle series of products, including Voyage, the $79 Kindle and the Paperwhite will receive a firmware update over the following weeks, bringing a few interesting features. Those include Word Rise, among others and Family Sharing.
Word Rise offers floating definitions for trickier words, floating over them. This is meant for children and non native speakers, so they can understand the text better. A preloaded dictionary was already part of the Kindle experience, but Word Rise puts it to good use. If you tap on floating definitions, you’ll open up synonyms and more details, plus a slider to adjust popups. Word Wise doesn’t work on all ebooks, though, being enabled on thousands of titles for now.
X-Ray for Books has also been updated, offering support for showing just the images in a title. The “About This Book” section has been expanded with more details on the title and a biography on the author. There’s new support for Family Library, allowing two Amazon accounts to share ebooks they’ve bought with each other. Finally, there’s Kindle FreeTime Unlimited, priced at $2.99 and offering unlimited access to children’s books.
There’s also Goodreads integration and an expanded Search covering the local Kindle library with Goodreads content.
