The Complete 2012 User's Guide to the Amazing Amazon Kindle: Covers All Current Kindles Including the Kindle Fire, Kindle Touch, Kindle Keyboard, and Kindle (9 page)

After you buy a book, wireless delivery takes less than one minute. Daily newspapers are delivered during the night or early morning and are on your Kindle when you wake up. Magazines and blogs are delivered whenever a new issue or post comes out.

On the Kindle Fire, you can also download music and videos to the Fire for listening and viewing offline.

Also, to clear up a common misconception, reading books and periodicals on the Kindle is not like reading a web page.
Once books and periodicals have been delivered to your Kindle, you do not need a wireless connection to read them.

Turning the Kindle On

Press the power switch on the bottom edge.

Slide the power switch to the right momentarily, until the charging light flashes green. The power switch is located on the lower edge of the Kindle Keyboard and the top edge of the Kindle DX.

When you turn on a new Kindle for the first time, it opens the Quick Start Guide. A used E Ink Kindle, it will open to the last page or screen that was open, unless it has been deregistered - in which case it will open to the Home screen. A used Fire opens to the Home screen.

Kindles usually come partially charged. Check the battery indicator in the upper right corner of the screen. You should charge your Kindle if the battery is less than 50% charged or before registering it. See Charging the Kindle.

Kindle basic controls: from left to right, Back, Keyboard, Five-way Controller, Menu, and Home. At bottom are the micro-USB port and power button

The Kindle Touch and Fire have the same controls on the bottom edge: from left to right, micro-USB jack, headphone jack, and power button. The Touch also has a Home button on the lower bezel.

The Kindle Keyboard also has a volume control rocker button and a microphone (which is not used by the current software).

In this book, buttons refer to control buttons or touch icons such as Home. The letter and number keys on the Kindle Keyboard and Kindle DX keyboards are referred to as keys.

These Kindles also have a five-way controller, which replaces a computer mouse for navigation and selection.

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Page buttons: Next and previous page buttons on the right and left edges let you turn pages with either hand.

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Home button: Always returns you to the Home page.

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Menu button: Pops up a menu appropriate to the current page.

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Back button: Backs up to the last screen viewed. This is not the same as the previous page buttons, which go to the previous page in a book or on a website.

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Shift key: The key with the up arrow in the lower left corner of the keyboard lets you enter upper case letters.

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Alt key: Press Alt and then a key on the top row to enter the numbers 1, 2, 3 ... 0 without having to use the Symbol (Sym) key.

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Del key: On the right side of the keyboard, the Del key works like a backspace key. To edit text that you've entered, in a search box for example, use the five-way controller to move the cursor just to the right of a letter, and then press Del to remove it.

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Return key: The key just below the Del key enters a carriage return and starts a new line. It is also used to show the full dictionary entry for a word.

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Sym key: Brings up a pop-up menu that lets you enter numbers and special characters.

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Aa key: Pops up a menu that lets you change font size, typeface, line spacing, words per line, and screen rotation. It also controls Text-to-Speech

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Five-way controller: The edges of the five-way controller let you move the screen cursor left, right, up, and down. If the cursor is not present, press up or down to bring it up. Press the center button to select the document at the cursor. In this book, the term select means to move the cursor across the screen, using the five-way controller, and then clicking the highlighted document by pressing the center button. The term click means to press the center button on the five-way controller

The Kindle Keyboard keyboard and buttons. The five-way controller is the square at right

Kindle basic controls- from left to right, Back, Keyboard, Five-way Controller, Menu, and Home

The Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire use on-screen touch controls instead of buttons for everything except power on/off (the Touch has a physical Home button on the lower bezel.)

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Home button: Always takes you to the Home screen

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Next Page: Touch anywhere except the top or left edge of the screen, or swipe left to right to page forward

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Previous Page: Touch the left edge of the screen or swipe right to left to page backward

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Menu and Toolbar: Touch the top edge of the screen to bring up the Menu and Tool bars

Every function on the Kindle Fire is activated by touching areas on the screen.

The Fire always starts on the Home screen (except the first time you turn on a new Fire.) You can always reach the Home screen by tapping the
  
Home icon on the left end of the Menu bar at the bottom of the screen. If the Menu bar is not visible, tap the center of the screen to bring it up.

The Back icon is always just to the right of the Home icon. Use the Back icon to return to the previous screen you were viewing.

The Home screen has a Status bar at the top and a Library bar just below. The middle of the screen is occupied by the Carousel, which lets you select from recently used books, music, videos, websites, and apps. The bottom of the screen has a Favorites area where you can pin your favorite content for quick access.

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Status bar: Displays the status of the Fire, including notifications from apps, Wi-Fi connection, and battery. Also gives quick access to common settings and tasks such as adjusting volume and display brightness, Wi-Fi settings, syncing to the Cloud, and controlling playback

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Search: Tap the Search field to search content or the web

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Content: Tap to choose from the content on your Fire- Newsstand, Books, Music, Video, Docs, Apps, and web