Amazon’s Kindle operating system is about as simple and straightforward as it gets. There are only two navigational tabs at the bottom of the screen: Home and Library. The Home tab consists of a large carousel of books from your library and two rows of Amazon-curated books under the banners of Books You May Like and Recommended For You. A search bar at the top of the screen allows you to search your books and the Kindle store. Tapping the four dots on the upper right of the screen will bring up a menu with options for your reading list, Goodreads, Amazon Kids, the web browser, household sharing, and settings. You can also create a collection from this menu.

(Credit: Sarah Lord)

You can purchase books directly on the device from Amazon’s Kindle Store or buy them on your computer and have them sent to your Kindle. Library books work with the Kindle as well. Libby, the library app from OverDrive, has plenty of books that can be sent directly to your Kindle when you check them out on your phone or tablet. You can also email your own documents directly to your Kindle using Amazon’s Send-to-Kindle feature. The company uses its Whispersync service to sync your progress across all your devices and offers free cloud storage for all your book and audio purchases. 

You can find all of this content in the Library tab, which launches a page filled with the book covers of everything you own. You can filter and sort your library while still being able to access the Search Kindle bar and the four-dot menu. 

Swiping down from the top of the display brings up Quick Settings, which include airplane mode, dark mode, sync, and a button that opens the full settings menu. The front light controls for brightness and warmth are also adjusted from here. 

The experience of reading a book on the Paperwhite has not changed. Tapping on the top of the screen while in a book brings up all of its information, including page, chapter, time left to finish, and percentage read. You can hit the Aa button to adjust the font, layout, and other reading options. 

(Credit: Sarah Lord)

While I generally enjoy reading on a Kindle, I have one long-standing gripe: I wish there were more levels of customization for font sizes, margins, and line spacing. This is the one area where competing ebook readers from Kobo and Onyx outshine Amazon, and it’s high time the company addressed the issue.

The Signature Edition comes without ads on the lock screen, which means you can set the device to show the book cover of your current read as the wallpaper. Unfortunately, you can’t fully customize the wallpaper, but it’s still nicer than seeing ads. Amazon charges an additional $20 for ad-free versions of its other Kindles.

Amazon offers four years of software and security updates, but doesn’t specify if the Signature Edition will receive any substantive OS updates over its lifetime.