My Kindle lockscreen was super bland until I found this secret setting

• What kind of Kindle do I need for this feature?
• How to make your book cover your Kindle lockscreen

Summary

• Display your current book’s cover on your Kindle lockscreen — give your E Ink reader a face.
• Supported models: Standard 8th+, Paperwhite 7th+, Oasis (all), Voyage 7th+, Colorsoft.
• Only available on ad‑free Kindles; you can pay to remove ads (e.g., ~$20 on a 2024 Paperwhite).

A proud Kindle owner is usually also a proud (and voracious) reader. It’s the kind of pride measured in the stacks of favorite titles weighing down our bookshelves and our tote bags. Sometimes, if I love a book on my e-reader, I’ll go out and buy a hardcover copy. It’s like a trophy, and a reminder of a story I enjoyed enough that it warranted a physical version, too.

Kindles and e-readers revolutionized morning commutes and ended the epidemic of cliffhangers. Having an e-book store available a few taps away made it so you never had to wait until morning to run to Barnes & Noble again. However, while it can house thousands of books, the Kindle itself is a faceless device. No cover art to intrigue a passerby to pick it up and read it.

Luckily, Amazon’s Kindle creators slipped in a workaround — one that lets you display the cover of your current read right there on your lockscreen. But, there are a few qualifications that your device needs to make it happen.

What kind of Kindle do I need for this feature?

It doesn’t work on every model

The first box to check is whether or not your model supports the feature. Any of the following models and generations may support the lockscreen feature:

• Standard Kindle — 8th generation or later
• Kindle Paperwhite — 7th generation or later
• Kindle Oasis — all models
• Kindle Voyage — 7th generation and later
• Kindle Colorsoft

If you have any other Kindle than what I mentioned above, the feature may not be available.

Next, when you bought your Kindle, you had the opportunity to choose between a version with or without ads. Only the models without ads have the feature. Luckily, if you bought an ad-supporting model, there is an option to remove ads for your Kindle and enable this feature from your Amazon account, as long as you don’t mind paying a premium.

It was $20 to remove ads from my 2024 Kindle Paperwhite, for example.

How to make your book cover your Kindle lockscreen

And display your current read with pride

Thankfully, all Kindles have an inherently intuitive interface, which makes navigating through menus easy. However, the setting to enable the feature is somewhat buried under a couple layers of menus:

1. Start on your Kindle’s home screen.
2. Tap the stop-light menu in the upper-right hand corner.
3. Tap Settings.
4. Select Screen and brightness.
5. Toggle on the setting that says Show covers on lock screen.

There you have it — now, you can display the cover of your current read for all to see. Your E Ink device is faceless, no more.