Archives

Saturday, July 31, 2010

Amazon Updates Kindle Software on iPad

On my way home from Dallas yesterday, I was killing time in DFW when I decided to buy a new book from the Amazon Kindle store. I was traveling light on this particular trip... The only device I was carrying was my iPad.

Fortunately the wise people at Amazon decided early on with the iPad to support & embrace the device instead of looking at it as competition. This means that if I want to access Kindle media on the iPad, "There's an app for that".

Actually I was wanting to try the iBooks store, but the book I wanted wasn't available there. However, after failing to find it in iBooks, I fired up the Amazon Kindle app & quickly located it in the Kindle store. Thank goodness for Amazon!

The great thing about the way Amazon has embraced the iPad is the seamless way it works. I searched directly from the Kindle app & purchased the book. It downloaded within seconds to the iPad and I was reading in less than a minute. My Kindle itself wasn't even involved. It was still sitting on the shelf in my office back home.

Now as the download was happening, I noticed that another book also downloaded. That one was The New Oxford American Dictionary. Since I hadn't purchased it, I was curious as to why it downloaded. I did a little research, and this was what I found.

It seems Amazon has updated their Kindle iPad app for iOS4. In doing so also brought along several improvements. It now has Google and Wikipedia lookup for words *and* the aforementioned dictionary. The dictionary is downloaded the first time you highlight a word, which is why I was surprised when it appeared.

There is also a feature that allows searching inside of books, which is a big deal for people with reference books or people like me that like to revisit parts I hadn't previously marked.

So kudos to Amazon for their commitment to improvement on all their platforms. Kudos also to their inventory. I wouldn't have had the book if it wasn't for them.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

No comments:

Post a Comment