Summary
- X-Ray on Kindle shows characters, places, terms, images and quick context inside the book.
- Access X-Ray from the in-book menu: tap top, open stop-light menu, then select X-Ray.
- Works offline, links to external sources sometimes, great for big casts and maps.
Once a bookworm, always a bookworm. If you’re the same, then you know the pain of choosing between rereading an old favorite novel, starting a new series, or going to the bookstore to stack another title atop the TBR pile. At one point or another, you’ve surely picked up more than one story at a time and tried to do a tandem read, which gets confusing fast if you’re mixing up one fantasy world with another. Iron might kill fairies in Terrasen, but it doesn’t do squat in Prythian.
Sometimes, you go weeks (or months… or even years) without finishing a book, and when you finally pick it back up, you’re completely lost. You flip open to a chapter filled with characters you barely remember. Are they brothers, or just best friends? Who is that side character, and where did she come from?
Or maybe you’re fully immersed in the series, but there are just so many characters that keeping track feels impossible. Sticky notes between pages can help, but if you’re reading on a Kindle or other e-reader, you can’t exactly wedge Post-its between digital pages. Fortunately, there’s a smart feature that handles all of that for you — keeping characters organized and easy to reference: X-Ray.
- Brand
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Amazon
- Screen
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7-inch E-ink, 300ppi, 16-level gray scale
- Storage
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16GB
What is X-Ray on Kindle e-readers?
Seeing between the lines
X-Ray is a reference tool built right into your Kindle. It lets you tap on the name of a character or place and instantly get contextual information on them. It even works with obscurer terms specific to that book.
Sometimes, depending on the book, there will even be hyperlinks to Goodreads, Wikipedia, or another external source that can provide more of an index on whichever term you choose. However, some users mention that some books’ X-Ray feature have next to no information while others serve as an entire index in and of itself.
As for the non-hyperlinked sources, you can even access them without an internet connection, such as on airplane mode or out and about without Wi-Fi. The information is stored within the e-book itself, and authors can even go in and add, edit, or simply enable X-Ray entries for their Kindle e-books through Amazon Direct Publishing.
Some of the things a book’s X-Ray will provide include:
- Biographies
- Related passages
- Extra context
- Notes that the author added themselves
How to access an e-book’s X-Ray
It’s a little hidden
Just like most of Kindle’s settings and features, X-Ray is easy to use and relatively intuitive to find. However, unlike changing the font size and margin sizes, X-Ray is in a different menu. Here’s how to find it:
- Start within the book you’re currently reading. Tap the top of the page to pull up the top menu.
- Tap the stop-light menu in the upper right-hand corner.
- Tap X-Ray.
Depending on your book, certain tabs will appear at the top. For example: Notable clips, People, Terms, and Images populated for the prequel to Throne of Glass, called Assassin’s Blade, by Sarah J Maas. This particular book is basically a collection of stories in various places, so it feels like there are dozens of characters to keep track of at all times, so I thought it perfect to use it to showcase the X-Ray feature.
The Notable clips section includes exactly that — X-Ray pulls various sentences and paragraphs from across the book that are important to the story or main characters themselves. You can use the tiny arrows on the left and right sides of the screen to toggle through them, and above the quote itself, there is a progress bar that tells you the location of each of the quotes, as well as the chapter or section name.
Under People, you’ll first see the mention of characters on your current page. Then, you can scroll down to see other characters in the book, as well as each of their mentions. The main character of Assassin’s Blade, Celaena Sardothien, was mentioned 1,081 times. When I clicked her name, I got access to tabs that showed me her individual notable clips, as well as all mentions of her name in general. For a main character, this may not be as helpful. However, for a character mentioned only once or twice at the beginning who makes a surprise appearance at the end, this feature is incredibly useful.
Terms is more hit-or-miss, but for series that feature different kinds of people and/or magic systems, like the Grishaverse books by Leigh Bardugo, it’s extra handy. Finally, Images is another section that will either be helpful or not — some books only have an image for the cover of the book itself. However, if your book features a map at the beginning or end, X-Ray is a great way to quickly reference it if you’re trying to get a lay of the land — it definitely helped me when I tried to understand the logistics of Sam and Frodo’s trip to Mordor.
