Amazon made good on its suggestion last month that it would begin to sell e-books beyond the Kindle by becoming the latest company to come up with an application for Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch. The company launched its Kindle for iPhone and iPod Touch app this morning, making it available for free from Apple’s App Store. By downloading the software, iPhone and iPod users will get access to the 240,000 e-books now available through Kindle. Amazon’s Whispersync technology will let users switch back and forth between the iPhone and Kindle and pick up reading a book or publication where they left off. The iPhone app will not include Amazon’s text-to-speech function.
Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos has maintained that reading “long form narrative” works, like books, is best done on a dedicated device that makes books easier to read, rather than books on cellphones, which are best used to read short pieces of texts. In remarks accompanying the iPhone announcement, Ian Freed, v-p for the Kindle, said reading books on the iPhone “is a great way for customers to catch up on their current book, wherever they are, like in line at the grocery store or between meetings.”
The other big players in the e-books for iPhone market are eReader and Lexcycle Stanza, both of which have iPhone and iPod Touch apps and download stores accessible through the iPhone. The addition of Amazon, however, significantly increases the number of titles available to iPhone users.
