# Question about going "back" in Kindle for Android



## Eltanin Publishing (Mar 24, 2011)

I've got a travel guide in the kindle app on my Android tablet. The book has lots of links to other places in the book, which is great, but there doesn't seem to be a back button. The back button at the bottom (beside the standard Android "home" and "open apps" buttons) takes me out of the book to my library in the kindle app. Any ideas? Luckily the TOC is pretty easy to get to and navigate, but a back button would be better.


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## tsemple (Apr 27, 2009)

This is a change they rolled out to the iOS and Android apps a couple of months ago. Back takes you back to the library. To go back to a previously established location, tap to bring up reading options, then look down to the navigation scrubber. There will be one or two black dots, representing previously established locations in the book. One of those will be the location you jumped to the footnote from. Tap on that dot, and it should return you back to where you were. It takes a little getting used to, and at first I was concerned that it would not work well, but I find it to be a clear improvement, because it lets you jump between up to three locations without setting up bookmarks or the like. The only issue seems to arise where the black dot is too close to the scrubber button, making it impossible to see or tap on. But in practice that seems a rare and almost theoretical occurrence. 

Most properly formatted books have back-links from the footnote in question, which take you back to the originating reference. I prefer not to use those, however, since it forces repagination and thus some loss of 'context'.


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## Eltanin Publishing (Mar 24, 2011)

Thanks for that. I finally found out how to do this a few days ago from the Amazon Help section on kindle for Android. I also learned you can change the brightness using two fingers and swiping up or down! Who knew!

I'd still prefer the back button to work as it does on an e-ink kindle - taking you back to where you were before you jumped. The dots usually work for me, but not always, particularly if there are a couple dots close together. The longer the book (and some of the Lonely Planet travel books are LONG), the more compressed the the navigation bar is. 

Footnotes should have a link back, but in the travel book, there might be, for instance, a list near the beginning for the area's "must see" attractions with links to more info on each of those attractions. There might be multiple places that link TO a certain attraction, so I wouldn't expect multiple links from the attraction BACK to all the places that link to it.


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