Amazon's new Kindle case is an insult to lefties everywhere

Amazon announced a refresh to the main Kindle lineup last week. There's some new fun colors (ube! seaglass!) for the regular Kindles, and some minor upgrades like faster page turn speed across the Paperwhite and Colorsoft versions.

It's the case that I find to be a microaggression — no, perhaps macro — to my existence as a left-handed person. In fact, it makes me wonder: Does Amazon HATE left-handed people?

Let me explain with a bit of history. The earliest Kindle models had physical buttons on both sides of the bezel. The top button went page back, the larger lower button went page forward. This meant it was easy to hold the Kindle comfortably in either hand — you had the same buttons on both sides.

But by the Kindle Paperwhite's debut in 2012, everything changed. Now, instead of forward and back buttons on both sides, you tapped the left side of the screen to go back, and the right side to go page forward.

Here I was, stuck with my crummy fifth-gen Kindle because I never wanted to upgrade to the better, faster, backlit Paperwhite versions with only right/left screen taps. At some point, my screen cracked, and I had to source a replacement on eBay, since they had been discontinued on Amazon years earlier.

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This all worked just fine for me until this summer, when Amazon announced it would no longer support older Kindle models. You could still read the books you had on there, but couldn't add new titles through the Amazon store.

Technically, you could flip the case upside down so that the buttons go on the left side, and the case folds from the right. The buttons can be customized so you can switch the top and bottom to be forward/backward. So yes, it's technically possible to make this more left-handed-friendly. But then you've got a case that's notably upside-down, opening the "wrong" way. Not ideal.

What I really want is to have the buttons on both sides — I prefer holding it in my left hand, but I like to switch hands every now and then for comfort.

But we lefties have been forced into uncomfortable situations all our lives in a world meant for right-handed people. It's been years since I've had to sit in one of those lecture hall or school desks meant for righties, but you all know the pain. We all suffer with silver graphite residue on our hands, with scissors that don't work, with measuring cups you have to wrangle around to see.