Apple recently changed the terms of iOS which basically put in restrictions on purchasing products within an iOS app. After companies felt the terms were a bit harsh, Apple toned down the rules a bit. But the general problem is that apps like the Kindle App for iPad/iPhone couldn’t link direct to the Amazon store for book purchases. This means that users need to manually open up Safari, buy a book and then go back to the Kindle app to download and read it. Although the solution is still completely mobile, it just adds in awkward steps that didn’t go down well with some Kindle users.
While Apple put these restrictions in place, Amazon was working on a new way to read Kindle books on an iPad. Today they have launched the Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader website that allows you to load it up on the Safari or Chrome browser on Mac, PC, Linux and Chrome OS. Mobile Safari on the iPad is included in the compatibility list, but it isn’t working for the iPhone just yet. Expect that to change soon.
On the iPad the website works best if you add it to the homescreen as Amazon has created an iPad friendly icon as well as launching from the homescreen makes it almost full screen (other than the status bar at the top).
As with all Kindle apps and access points, all you do is load it up, log in with your Amazon account and your books are ready for you to browse. The first time you use the site it will ask if it can increase the database size on the iPad. Click to agree this and when you get past that screen the app prepares to function in offline mode. To do this, it spends a few minutes downloading the app and the data so that when you don’t have a WiFi or 3G signal, you can carry on reading and sync with whisper sync when back in a signal area.
In general, the app works well and looks good although some page turns were a little slow as it seemed to be loading sets of pages in to memory and once past them, it downloaded the next set to memory. We expect that over time Amazon will increase the reliability and make it a smoother process to use.
You can access the new Amazon Cloud Reader at read.amazon.com.
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