I don’t own a Kindle, but I read Kindle books in the Kindle app on my iPad. Works great as an ebook reader, but I can’t figure out how to turn off “popular highlights”. I saw that you explained how to disable popular highlights in the Mac Kindle app, can you show me how to do that on my iPad too?
Once I shared that you can turn off the Popular Highlights feature in the Kindle app, lots of people have been asking about their specific system and configuration. Apparently, it’s not as, um, popular as the Amazon team might think. In fact, it seems like exactly the kind of feature that should default to being off, not on. But that’s just me. 🙂
My primary ebook reader is also an Apple iPad, though I use an iPad Mini, and the first generation units (which you can find for a steal through third parties and refurb sites. Heck, Apple itself often sells older generation iPad Mini units at a substantial discount through the Apple Refurb Store) work great as an ebook reader and have zillions of other iPad apps you can run, including mail, iTunes, movies, Netflix, and much more. A win:win from a technological perspective.
Back to your iPad, though. It’s easy to turn off Popular Highlights, but the setting isn’t where you might think it should be. In fact, the Kindle iOS app has an interface all its own, quite unlike any other iPad app I’ve seen.
To start off, however, here’s the end of a chapter in a book I’m currently reading with the Popular Highlights displayed (it’s the dotted underscore):
(I have, of course, chopped down the image just a bit to make things flow better. In case you’re wondering!)
You might think that tapping on the three horizontal lines on the top left would give you the ability to hide these highlights, but quite the opposite, it actually gives you a shortcut to the page that lets you see all the popular highlights instead:
You can tap on “Popular Highlights” and see more passages that people particularly like, if you’re curious. Or you can just proceed by tapping on “Library” to go back to the home screen of the Amazon Kindle app for iOS.
Yours will look like this (though with different books!):
Here’s the secret: On the very lower right, barely visible, is a button labelled “Settings“. Tap on that and you’ll have a small menu pop up:
What’s not obvious at all is that there are more choices on this menu than are being displayed.
What you want to do is swipe upwards on the menu itself, and more options will be magically revealed:
Still not quite what you want, so tap on “Other“, the very last choice on the hidden app menu.
Now you’ll see how to disable or turn off Popular Highlights in the Kindle app:
So there’s the feature! Simple tap on the green slider adjacent to “Popular Highlights” and it’ll be disabled. That’s all there is to it. Easy, once you know where to look. Oh, and the other features here are worth checking out too, if you want to swipe up and see what options you have.
Finally, tap on “Settings” to close the menu, tap on your book again, and those pesky highlights are now gone:
Now you know how to fix it, go forth and read up a storm with the Kindle app on your iPad!
The settings you talk about are not there in the updated version of the app. I am wondering how I can turn off the “Popular Highlights “ ?
While reading your book, tap on the “Aa” link, then “More” and you’ll see the setting for “Popular Highlights”. Just verified it’s still there!
Yes, the highlight setting is indeed found in the ‘AA’ link of individual books. The problem, however, is that there seems to be no permanent way of turning off the highlight function. The function defaults to the ‘on’ position after you exit the settings. There seems to be no way of saving the ‘off’ instruction!
Hello,
I found this option in settings on my own. I was so glad because it annoyed the crap out of me seeing those stupid dotted lines. The footer also bugs me IMMENSELY, and I turned that off as well. The option is now gone with a recent update for the app, and all this garbage is back now ???? I’m wondering if you know of a secret way around their update to remove the crap again. Thank you so much!!!!
I have completed the procedure described but it didn’t work. The highlights are still there.
Thank you!! My books are much more enjoyable now.
Thank you so much for your helpful guidance. This is totally appreciated! All the time you must have spent learning technology has paid off !
thanks – this has been annoying me for a while.
Thank you so very much!!!! I was going crazy trying to figure it out.
Thank you so much for explaining how to turn off popular highlights on my iPad mini. They’ve been driving me mad! You’ve made my week. Possibly my year.
Cheers.