Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority
I’ve owned some version of a Kindle for well over a decade, and it remains one of the few pieces of technology that I use every single day. Between all its strengths like the unmatched e-ink screen, battery life measured in weeks, and the sheer portability, the Kindle is fundamentally a device built for content consumption. As a tool for reading with limited annotation capabilities, the Kindle lies squarely in Amazon’s walled garden. Over the years, Amazon has given it a limited additions like the ability to look up definitions using a dictionary that is useful but painfully isolated. Sure, there are features like X-Ray for deeper story insights, but those only work if you have bought a book from Amazon’s storefront. For the dedicated reader or an enthusiast like me, if you want to deeply engage with the source material, that consumption-only focus has always been the system’s biggest flaw. You essentially needed a smartphone alongside if you wanted to look up additional context.
Adding Gemini to the Kindle is the single biggest upgrade any reader can make to their reading experience.
My dream Kindle would be an active, intelligent research tool. One that could instantly answer questions about the book I was reading, summarising concepts, and even generating spoiler-free character lists based on my progress so far. Turns out, that’s entirely possible if you decide to take the plunge and jailbreak your Kindle. Recently, I discovered Assistant, a plugin for the powerful open-source reading application KOReader. This plugin lets you tap into popular AI language models like Google Gemini, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and even Ollama if you want to keep things local. So, I did the obvious thing and dug deep into it as a fun weekend project. Suffice it to say, this is exactly what I’ve been missing my entire life. The plugin has fundamentally transformed my Kindle from a passive e-reader into an active, indispensable knowledge assistant, and I’m not going back. It’s the single biggest upgrade any serious reader can make to their reading experience. Here’s why.
Would you use AI tools that explain or summarise books on your Kindle? 15 votes Yes, for complex books. 40 % Yes, for everything. 40 % No, I like backtracking and research. 20 % Not sure. 0 %
Solving the friction of external research
Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority
As an avid reader of history and science fiction, the core problem with reading on a Kindle is that it forces a binary choice on you just like a real book. If you’re coming back to a book after a while, either you power through sections with limited understanding or use an alternate method like a smartphone to do research. In 2025, I expect more from a device that is expected to be a replacement for physical books.
The moment you encounter a complex theory in a science book, a deep historical reference, or even a character that hasn’t been referenced in a while in a fantasy novel, the Kindle’s built-in tools fall apart. There is no real way to catch up as the Kindle’s built-in dictionary is precisely that, a dictionary, that is wholly disconnected from the context of the book in your hands. To me, that’s the death of deep focus. When I pick up my smartphone to look up a character, I inevitably end up getting into a rabbit hole on Wikipedia, or fan accounts on Reddit. None of which is conducive to deep reading.
I went from losing minutes on Wikipedia rabbit holes to getting two sentence explanations on my e-ink screen.
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