Amazon has redesigned the Kindle Highlights page

Kindle readers have, from day one, had the ability to highlight text in Kindle books, and to add notations. I blogged about this in 2011, because it's a very useful feature for book reviewers. While you are reading, highlighted text appears shaded (on a Kindle Fire you can choose shading colors) and notes look like footnote references. But what makes this feature so useful is you can access these notes and highlights from your web browser, which means you can copy and paste them into a Word document or blog post or email or whatever.

Now Amazon had redesigned the web interface, and changed the URL. Here's the old look, which was accessed from https://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights:

Usable, but pretty bland, no?

Here's the new look, accessed from https://read.amazon.com/kp/notebook:

Not only is it visually more interesting, because of the book cover from on the left, but the edit and delete notes and delete highlights buttons are easier to see. When you sync your Kindle, edits you made to the web version are copied back to your Kindle. That's pretty cool! 

Sadly, they did not change the limitation that makes this page only display notes and highlight from books bought at the Kindle store. Any other item on your Kindle, whether it's an MS Word doc containing your shopping list, or a Project Gutenberg copy of War and Peace, is treated as a "personal document." It can be highlighted and annotated on the Kindle, but those will not appear in the web interface. 

Even the look of the tab in the browser is different. New on the left, old on the right:

What I find most interesting is that Amazon has spent the time and money to enhance an existing feature, which suggests that readers are, in fact, using that feature. I can only assume they use the data they collect to plan their development efforts. If so, I wonder if the growth in audio-books will make them restore the read-aloud function, which is not available on the new e-ink models, like the Voyage and the Paperwhite.  They put some development into helping people with limited or no vision with the Voiceview feature, so I would hope they wouldn't give up on read-aloud Kindles. 

Updated: I miss the Update button! It seems slower to load to me, although that might be a function of  Chrome since it seemed to load OK with Edge.