Amazon adds Whispersync for Voice and Immersion Reading to audiobooks for Kindle Fire

At this morning’s Amazon Kindle event, CEO Jeff Bezos announced that the company is adding audiobooks with Whispersync for Voice to its Kindle Fire tablets, letting you keep a single bookmark across text and audio versions of the same book. In the same vein, Amazon is enabling a new feature called Immersion Reading, which it describes as a fusion of Kindle and audio versions of the same book — letting you follow along in print while you listen to a professional narrator read for you. Real-time highlighting of what’s being spoken (pictured below) makes sure you never lose your place, so you don’t have to worry about momentarily taking your eyes off the screen. Amazon says that so-called bimodal reading improves retention and understanding for pretty much everyone, so there’s no reason to feel like reading along with a narrator makes you look like a second-grader.