Do you like bibliosmia too?

By | October 21, 2024

I’ve gotten back into reading ebooks lately, after a recommendation from my colleague Jess, and I came across something that I thought might be useful for you to know, if you also like to read.

Now don’t get me wrong – physical books will always have a special place in my heart.  Physically turning pages, inhaling the smell of a new book (which is apparently a phenomenon called bibliosmia) and being able to hold a story in my hands will always be special to me.

But I prefer to read in bed before I go to sleep, and my partner is one of those early to bed, early to rise people, so I don’t want to disturb him by turning the light on.  So instead, I use my tablet with the brightness turned down low so it doesn’t disturb him.

It reminds me of being a kid, and staying up long past my bedtime with a torch, reading under the covers and hoping my parents wouldn’t find out.  Although that torch somehow never ran out of batteries… (thanks mum and dad).

However, since getting back into reading ebooks, I’ve found a mildly annoying quirk.  I tend to use the Kindle app, because you can get it on pretty much any device, but as of a few months ago, you can’t actually buy ebooks from that app, or even from the Amazon shopping app.

Instead, you have to open your web browser e.g. Google Chrome or Safari, go to the Amazon website, and buy the ebook there.  You then need to come back to the Kindle app, where you find the book you just bought and download it, before you can read it.

It’s a bit of a first-world problem I suppose, but it does seem a bit ironic considering that Amazon’s whole schtick is that they make things so convenient (in theory!) for their customers.  But I did find a pretty easy way around it.

On an Android device, if you double tap on the Recent Apps button, it takes you out of your current app, to the previous app you were using. So if I come out of the Kindle app, open Chrome and buy the ebook on Amazon, I can just double tap on Recent Apps, and I’m straight back into my Kindle Library.

And I can do a very similar thing on an iPad or iPhone – once I’ve opened Safari, gone to Amazon and bought the ebook, I can just open the App Switcher. You do this either by double tapping on the Home button, or swiping up from the Home bar and holding your finger in the middle of the screen for a second or two. Then you just tap on the Kindle app to get stuck back in.

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