Amazon Launches Kindle for iPhone, iPod Touch 

 

It’s really interesting and quite fascinating to see great ideas materialize in very useful gadgets, apps or machines such as the Kindle 2 electronic reader, the iPhone or the App Store. It’s even more interesting to see those great ideas interact to create even more added value and the latest such case is Amazon.com’s release of the Kindle for iPhone. 

 

The giant online retailer announced the new release on Tuesday night. Now iPhone users will be able to read more than 240,000 Kindle-formatted books from Amazon’s e-book library. The app is free to download from the App Store and it enables users to access all the Kindle e-books in their Amazon account. 

 

The downloaded e-books can be transferred via WiFi in the iPhone or iPod Touch. To properly use this new app, iPhone or iPod Touch users must have the 2.1 software update installed. 

 

When they are not near a computer, users can access their Amazon.com account via the Safari Web browser on their iPhone and the already-purchased Kindle e-books can be downloaded directly into the smart phone at no additional costs. 

 

An interesting feat of the new app is called Whispersync. This practically enables users to go from their Kindle to their iPhone and back, while remembering the page they were last reading, synchronizing the devices. Whispersync was announced by Amazon shortly after launching the Kindle 2 and this was a sure hint that the Kindle-way of reading e-books would soon extend to other devices. 

 

Amazon’s Kindle is not the first e-book reader on the iPhone. E-readers such as Classics, which offers a number of literary masterpieces for $2.99 a piece, and Stanza, which brings you 50,000 e-books for free, were in the App Store before Amazon launched its Kindle 2. However, none of them has the brand name strength of the Kindle. 

 

The new release is certainly good news for avid book readers who do not have a Kindle. First of all, the new app considerably increases the number of e-books available for the two Apple Devices. Even Kindle owners will most likely enjoy the option of reading their books on the go when they do not have the Kindle with them. 

 

The launch of the Kindle for iPhone is very good move from Amazon. First of all, price of the Kindle ($359) is not quite a selling strong point. Many customers will probably prefer to purchase an iPhone or iPod Touch and read the e-books on those devices. 

 

Maybe Amazon realized that the price of the Kindle will probably limit e-books sales potential of the company, which is first an e-books seller and then a Kindle seller. This might be the main reason why Amazon expanded the Kindle to the iPhone.