Amazon just announced a free update to Kindle Fire. Version 6.3 of the tablet software includes:
- In-book sharing - You can highlight a passage and share it to social networks and the Kindle website, along with a note, all without leaving the book you're reading.
- Book extras - Also without leaving the book, you can pull up extras such as author bios, glossaries, character lists and other references. This would be handy with the character-rich, geography-intensive "Game of Thrones" and George R.R. Martin's subsequent lengthy volumes.
- Personal documents - You can store personal documents in Amazon's cloud, and access them from the Documents tab in the Kindle Fire. Any notes you make on those documents get automatically synced.
- Print-replica textbooks - These are textbooks priced lower than their paper originals that preserve the layouts of the original book. Not sure that's ideal for the tablet's 7-inch screen, but it's nice for students to have the option.
- Reading view in Silk browser - Like other mobile browsers before it, Amazon's Silk browser for the Kindle Fire now has a reading view, which strips away all of the "host of competing material" that surrounds the prose. (Those ads and related stories are crucial to the income of many a media outlet, but it is nice to have a clean view of what you're reading.)
- Movie rentals - Apparently, there was a bug that started the 24-hour rental period when the movie was downloaded. Amazon fixed it so that the clock starts ticking only when you start watching, like on other devices.
There are more features and bug fixes in the update, which you can read about here, along with instructions on how to get it loaded up on your own Kindle Fire.
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