Fantastic VOYAGE

Amazon’s new e-reader borders on perfection

There is only one kind of Christmas present most of us ever get – and it’s the worst one possible. A book. Never mind the ‘ a book’s a book’ brigade who assault you with horrors from the promotional piles at Waterstones ( 1,000,000 Little Poems About Love etc); the creative gifters are far worse.

Aunts who have no idea what you read, watch or enjoy, will suddenly decide you might enjoy Russell Brand’s Revolution, having recently seen the nice young gentleman on television.

So gods be praised for Kindle Voyage: an easy, no-thinking-required gift for semi-literate relatives to buy for the ‘family bookworm’.

We bookworms will thank you with tears in our eyes.

It’s the first proper upgrade since Amazon launched its range, and it has created an ‘iPhone moment’ here. The glass-fronted, slimline reader is now so shudderingly sexy that my old grey Kindle looks like a calculator that has crept out of a filing cabinet. I now hate the dingy old thing with a passion.

People who read books are, of course, above megapixel envy, and shun flashing lights and other technological bells and whistles with the same horror we feel for novels with more than one author listed on the dust jacket. But most of the techno-tweaks here are to make reading easier, rather than impress passers-by. They fade obligingly into the background, like Jeeves.

The lighting around Voyage’s screen now auto-adjusts to the conditions. Text is crisp, and the paper Persil-white, without you having to lift a finger.

Nor do you have to fiddle with light settings outdoors as you compensate for the Sun’s impolite habit of moving just as you’re getting to the good bit. Voyage’s front lights do it for you (they’re around the screen, rather than behind it, so you don’t get that irksome feeling of having a soldering iron in your synapses as one does with iPad). They even tune themselves down over time if you’re reading in bed.

The page-turning bumpers are lovable little gizmos too. The Voyage has a touchscreen (of course), so brushing a word offers a dictionary definition, or tells you that Scurgleworth the VIII is the outcast son of some hirsute family in Game Of Thrones, but flipping pages is done with two touch-sensitive bars on the side. They’re flat to the surface, but you rapidly learn where they are.

Push down and you’ll feel a faint buzz, and the page flips instantly – no more of the queasy grey ‘in between’ pages you had on previous Kindles. This allows you to read one-handedly with perfect ease, and thus show off to your bus and train carriage, that, yes, you have the new Amazon one, and by extension probably read an awful lot of books. Clever ones, too.

I have to admit, I didn’t come to Voyage with high expectations but Amazon has done it – turned my perfectly good old Kindle into a worthless, hated relic.

Santa, are you listening?