Amazon begins to sell e-books for mobiles – telephone portable

 5 Mar 2009 - By Omar Mariño+
 omar@myddnetwork.com


Nobody in the editorial industry knows what  is the future of the digital book, but the companies that bet for its success are determined to generate its expansion by facilitating the adoption of this technology. Amazon, company that markets the Kindle (a device to read e-books that is available in USA for $359) had announced on February 9 it was looking to expand the reach of its e-book reader into the mobile phone space and yesterday this move was completed. Now, anyone with an iPhone or iTouch can download (for free) an application, which is also called Kindle, and read books on the two small Apple gadgets.


Amazon begins to sell e-books for mobiles - telephone portable

The new mobile version works like the original Kindle, which is not yet available in Europe. Users can buy one of the nearly  240,000 available e-books (directly from the Kindle or, in the case of iPhone and iTouch, by going to the Amazon website). Also, users can enlarge the size of the text,  underline text, highlight text and make annotations.

In the case of iPhone and iTouch, the e-books can be seen with their original colors (the new Amazon Kindle 2 only displays 16 shades of grey). In all the cases, the users can download books that have been bought on Amazon previously or the first chapter of any book for free. Also, people who have the Kindle device and, at the same time, an iPhone (or iTouch) can synchronize bookmarks across the two systems, so these people  can easily resume reading where they last left off.

Apparently, the reduced size of the screen of the iPhone and the iTouch is not a problem for Amazon, although reading the books on these devices will not be a comfortable thing for some users. On the other hand, some features of the Kindle device are not available on the Kindle application, including access  to newspapers and magazines. Anyway, the important thing is Amazon has taken another step into this market where some companies like Sony and Google have started to become serious competitors. We’ll see what happens.

Do you want the Kindle app for your iPhone? Click here






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