Spotted today on Slashdot, Amazon Releases iPhone Kindle Software.
“The Amazon Kindle 2 just started shipping last week, but Amazon surprised everyone late on March 3rd by placing the Amazon Kindle software for the iPhone in the Apple App Store. With the Whispersync technology you can now keep your Kindle and iPhone ebooks in sync and read everywhere you go. Readers on the iPhone also now get access to over 200,000 ebook titles on the Amazon Kindle storefront. Check out the hands-on image gallery and video of the Amazon Kindle software on the iPhone and Kindle 2.”
via Slashdot | Amazon Releases iPhone Kindle Software.
The Slashdot article links to a decent review of the new app and how it words. But how accessible is this new app?
Kindle e-Book app for the iPhone
Being visually impaired makes me skeptical of reading on my iPod Touch. But it is not impossible, there are several decent e-book reader apps already on the iPhone platform, including the feature rich, but content poor, Stanza and the content rich, but accessibility poor, Shortcovers. My wife has a first generation Kindle, so I tapped into her account to test out the new Kindle app.
The only accessibility feature the Kindle app offers is scalable font. There is no zoom or landscape mode, nor even an dark-on-light color scheme option. But I can actually read the largest font settings with my reading glasses. This is true for the other e-book readers I have reviewed and it means that the Kindle app meets my minimal accessibility criteria; I can actually use it.
I don’t think I could read on the iPhone for a long time, but I certainly could do it for short periods of time. I have to hold the device up to my face, which is uncomfortable, but I have to do that with anything I read. The Touch is lighter than any of Neal Stephenson’s books, even the paperbacks.
The Amazon Kindle iPhone app is available on the iPhone or through the iTunes App Store. Read more iPhone accessibility reviews here. Read more about accessible reading here.
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Most annoying thing about this app, for me, is it’s only avaliable in the USA so I can’t even check it out!
I wish somebody tell the copyright lawmakers that the net is now global and information doesn’t respect international boundaries anymore. Trying to make it do that is stupid.
I read somewhere that there is new legislation in the works to bring us copyright and patent law more in line with the international community.
@oberazzi has published an article on the accessibility of the iPhone’s Kindle application: http://is.gd/lQbo
The problem with international copyright is that the publishing companies buy “rights” to sell a book or an ebook or an audiobook in a specific country. So if Amazon owns the ebook rights to sell the book in, say, the USA and Canada and the UK they won’t be allowed to sell it to me in Australia.
The biggest problem with this system is that often publishing companies buy the rights to sell ebooks or audiobooks and then don’t produce them. So it’s possible that there’s NO way for me to legally buy a certain ebook in Australia even though the ebook exists and is for sale legally in another country. This drives me crazy, for obvious reasons!
Incidentally, it’s a similar reason (but not quite the same) that the bookshare.org archive is basically only available to USA residents. That drives me nuts too, because there isn’t ANY ebook repository for print disabled users in Australia so there’s no legal way at all to get ebooks for people with a print disability. THAT’s crazy.