Yesterday, Amazon announced a new navigation feature called Page Flip. It enables readers to do with ebooks something readers have always done with print books: you can flip the pages, referencing different parts of the book, all the while keeping your current place in the book you’re reading.

The Page Flip feature saves the page that you are reading and pins it to the side. One tap will take you back to the pinned page.

There are so many instances where this feature would come in handy: travel books with pictures and maps especially come to mind. It is also one of the areas that would add a some much needed functionality to e-textbooks, dictionaries and other non-fiction texts that are not necessarily read in a linear fashion.

According to the press release,

Zoom out to get a bird’s eye view of the book and quickly find what you’re looking for. At a glance, easily recognize specific pages as you jump around. Pictures, charts, your highlights, and the layout of each page are easy to see with Page Flip’s pixel-accurate thumbnails that automatically adjust as you change your font and margin settings.

Note that Page Flip will not be available on every Kindle book. To find books utilizing the feature, check the Kindle ebook store page for any given book and look for “Page Flip: Enabled” in the features list.

For more into about the new feature, see www.amazon.com/pageflip. Page Flip will be delivered as part of a free, over-the-air update starting today to Kindle E-readers, Fire tablets, and the free Kindle app for iOS and Android. There is no number listed for this update and this seems to be a separate one from the 5.8.1 update that brings back the much requested reading dots feature.