I’m very happy with yesterday’s update of the Kindle app, which added an inline dictionary. Now I am seriously considering it for assigning class texts.

I do wish that the Kindle offered a few more things.

1. The ability to tag or otherwise sort comments, and email just one set of tagged comments (so I could give students an in-class assignment to mark up a passage to explore a certain theme, or ask students to send me the words they marked as “I had to look this word up,” or mark passages theta they will use for the “con” part of their argument). I’d like to be able to see just the annotations they made on that theme, rather than sort through all the annotations they ever made.
2. The ability to record, tag, and share audio notes.
3. Text-to-speech, without having to change the system settings. The ability to read aloud all highlighted passages, or annotations. The ability to filter this reading-aloud by tags or keywords would also be nice.
4. Line-art annotations, so I can scribble question marks and make squiggly underlines and draw boxes around keywords and square brackets around key passages, just as I do in my print books.
5. Side-by-side windowed views of different passages in the same book, or passages in different books.