If you’re sensitive to the light, you can invert the display to display white text on a black background. Battery life remains the single best reason to choose an E Ink display over the far more beautiful displays found on tablets.įor readers who wish to more fully customize their experience, the Oasis comes with eight fonts, in 14 sizes, at five different levels of boldness.

In a world where I am still charging my phone multiple times per day, even a week without having to charge a device feels like a luxury. If you read your Kindle for 30 minutes a day with wireless and Bluetooth off, and set your backlight at about 40 percent of maximum, Amazon says the Oasis will last for six weeks on a single charge. In most other ways, though, the Oasis lives up to the promise of a premium e-reader. The fact that the free Kindle app on my iPhone allows for more immersive reading than a $250 reading machine feels deeply unfortunate. On the other hand, it’s exactly the kind of serious reader feature that the Oasis is seemingly built to support. On one hand, immersion reading likely accounts for a tiny fraction of the books consumed on Kindles - primarily because doing so requires buying the ebook and the audiobook separately. Tap the “switch to listening” button in the top menu and the Oasis switches to a static page showing the time left in the chapter, a grayscale picture of the cover, and various audio controls. You can read your book, or you can have the Kindle read to you through your Bluetooth speakers, but you can’t do both. Keeping my eyes on the page as the narrators read draws me further into the world of the story, while still leaving room for the narrators’ performances to bring life to the text.īizarrely, you can’t listen to Audible narration while readingīizarrely, the Oasis does not support immersion reading. Amazon’s mobile apps have a feature called “immersion reading” that lets you read the book on the page as it’s being narrated for you, which is useful, I find, when tackling books with archaic or unfamiliar language (I recently slogged through Crime and Punishment), or books with unconventional structures (such as George Saunders’ marvelous Lincoln in the Bardo, which has an audiobook that features 166 narrators). In practice, this means that I can read a book on the subway and then have it narrated for me as I walk the last 10 minutes or so to my office, maximizing the time I can spend in the world of a book. One of Amazon’s most underrated services is Whispersync, which syncs your place in a book across all your devices and, if you have bought the audiobook as well, the audio narration. I’m a recent convert to audiobooks, and the idea of a Kindle that would narrate for me held great appeal.

How to use kindle oasis audio