if you have Get yourself a Kindle for e-book reading (perhaps a new model like the Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition or the Kindle Colorsoft), and you'll know how simple the interface and controls of these devices are. The focus is on the text and whatever you are reading.
Behind its simple and friendly interface, Kindle has more features and tricks than you might imagine. Of course, these e-readers won't compete with the iPad in functionality, but you can do a lot with them—from customizing the reading experience to bringing content other than e-books to the screen.
Don't be confused by unfamiliar words you encounter while reading. You can get the definition of anything on the screen just by holding the word. When the definition appears, you can swipe left to see if there is a Wikipedia entry for the word, then swipe left again to translate the word into another language.
You can also use Kindle to keep up with online reading by sending web articles to your device. Perhaps the easiest option is the official Kindle extension for Google Chrome - as long as you just want to send articles from your desktop web browser. Once you're logged into your Amazon account, you can transfer your articles in just a few clicks.
The Kindle extension is fast and free, but it doesn't always format web pages correctly and doesn't work on mobile devices. Instapaper's Kindle sync service does a better job, but you need the $6-per-month Premium plan to access it. Push to Kindle is also good, but requires a $3 monthly subscription fee to send more than 10 articles per month.
For example, if you want to showcase your library or share passages from a book on social media, you can take a screenshot on your Kindle. Just click on the two opposite corners in the corner. The screen flashes and the screenshot is saved. Connect your Kindle to your computer using a USB cable and you'll find that all screenshots are saved in their own dedicated folders.
As you add more and more e-books (and web articles) to your library, it can start to get a little unwieldy, and sorting it to find your next read becomes more difficult. You can mitigate this to some extent by creating collections. These are essentially folders for sorting titles, whether by genre, author, or when you want to read them.
First, from the Kindle home page, click the three dots in the upper right corner, then Create collection. Name your collection and mark it as a collection if you like (this makes it appear more prominent on various screens). You can then choose to sort your Library page by collection - just click the Sort By icon (the three horizontal lines in the upper right corner).