Amazon announced a refresh to the main Kindle lineup last week. There’s some new fun colors (ube! seaglass!) for the regular Kindles, and some minor upgrades like faster page turn speed across the Paperwhite and Colorsoft versions.
Excitingly, there are two nifty new accessories for page turning: a remote control called the Kindle Click and a case with physical buttons.
The remote I have no beef with. Seems nifty.
It’s the case that I find to be a microaggression — no, perhaps macro — to my existence as a left-handed person. In fact, it makes me wonder: Does Amazon HATE left-handed people?
Early Kindles had click buttons on both sides
Let me explain with a bit of history. The earliest Kindle models had physical buttons on both sides of the bezel. The top button went page back, the larger lower button went page forward. This meant it was easy to hold the Kindle comfortably in either hand — you had the same buttons on both sides.
But by the Kindle Paperwhite’s debut in 2012, everything changed. Now, instead of forward and back buttons on both sides, you tapped the left side of the screen to go back, and the right side to go page forward.
This means that it’s much easier if you’re holding the device in your right hand. If you’re holding it in your left, you have to either use your other hand or awkwardly stretch over the screen as you hold.
Click buttons on both sides made it easier for lefties
As a left-handed person, I much prefer holding a phone or Kindle in my left hand. The fact that the older models of Kindles made it easy for lefties to read while holding in their dominant hand was one of the best things about them! Better than physical books, even (there, I said it! I am unashamed!)
Here I was, stuck with my crummy fifth-gen Kindle because I never wanted to upgrade to the better, faster, backlit Paperwhite versions with only right/left screen taps. At some point, my screen cracked, and I had to source a replacement on eBay, since they had been discontinued on Amazon years earlier.
This all worked just fine for me until this summer, when Amazon announced it would no longer support older Kindle models. You could still read the books you had on there, but couldn’t add new titles through the Amazon store.
Incredibly annoying from a sort of libertarian right-to-repair kind of way, but especially annoying for lefties like me who had been holding onto the click button devices for years.
The new case only has buttons on the right side
So, back to the new Kindle cases. The new cases have click buttons (yay!) but only on the right-hand side. It doesn’t solve the problem of us lefties being shut out of easy page-turning!
Technically, you could flip the case upside down so that the buttons go on the left side, and the case folds from the right. The buttons can be customized so you can switch the top and bottom to be forward/backward. So yes, it’s technically possible to make this more left-handed-friendly. But then you’ve got a case that’s notably upside-down, opening the “wrong” way. Not ideal.
What I really want is to have the buttons on both sides — I prefer holding it in my left hand, but I like to switch hands every now and then for comfort.
Look, there are a lot of scary things out in the world right now with tech. AI is (maybe) going to kill us. iPhones are getting more expensive. People are walking around whispering into weird AI devices. There are obnoxious pranksters in Meta glasses messing with Walmart employees for content. Sure, the button placement on a Kindle case isn’t the biggest crisis of the moment.
But we lefties have been forced into uncomfortable situations all our lives in a world meant for right-handed people. It’s been years since I’ve had to sit in one of those lecture hall or school desks meant for righties, but you all know the pain. We all suffer with silver graphite residue on our hands, with scissors that don’t work, with measuring cups you have to wrangle around to see.
For one brief moment, we had the ambidextrous utopia of the click-button Kindles, accommodating us as we are. It’s not too much to dare to ask to be remembered in user design — us lefties exist! We buy consumer electronics!
Andy Jassy, hear my words: give us lefties the back our buttons!
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