Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2011 > August > 10 > Entry
Amazon brings Kindle reader to the cloud (and your desktop)
Above: the only three books I own for the Amazon Kindle store.
Amazon today released the Kindle Cloud Reader, a web-based version of its Kindle e-book software that can be accessed by browsers like Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari. It’ll allow anyone who’s bought books through Amazon’s Kindle store to access them on a computer or on some devices like the Apple iPad (in its Safari browser) without installing an app.
In my quick testing, the app works fine with options familiar to Kindle app readers like the options to make the font smaller or larger, to read with a white, sepia or black background, or to set margins. You can bookmark pages and sync where you left off, but you can’t make notes or annotations, unfortunately. Also, the page numbers seem way off, no matter what size font or margins I use: a 250-page-or-so book is said to be 3,000 pages long and flipping each page causes the page count to jump ahead 15 or 20 pages. And you can’t cut and paste text out of the Cloud Reader.
As a new school year starts, it seems like the e-books market is heating up. Amazon is expected to release some sort of new Kindle-branded color tablet device in the coming months and recently began selling refurbished Kindle models for $99. Barnes & Noble, meanwhile, is offering $100 in e-books and study guides for Nook purchases through September.
And Apple? I imagine they’ll be making some moves soon in this space as well.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Applications, Internet
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By KindleLover
August 10, 2011 4:58 PM | Link to this
The page numbers to which you are referring are not actually page numbers in a Kindle book. Those are "locations", which is why there are 3,000+ in a 250 page book. I have been reading Kindle books for several months now and from what I can tell, a location is roughly a paragraph. Kindle used locations exclusively because it was easier to pinpoint a specific part of a book when pages vary due to changes in font size, etc. Some Kindle books now have actual page numbers in addition to the location information and those page numbers correspond to the page numbers in the printed book.