Review: Amazon's Kindle App For iPhoneReview: Amazon's Kindle App For iPhone

Eager to try Amazon's e-books, but not willing to shell out $359 for a Kindle? Now there's an alternative: An e-book reader from Amazon that's completely free -- if you already own an iPhone or iPod Touch.

Amazon this week released free Kindle e-book software for the iPhone and Touch, allowing users to buy Amazon e-books and share them between Kindle hardware and iPhone. I've been using it for a few days now, and I have to say, I'm excited. I think it's great software, and I'm looking forward to spending a lot of money happy hours reading books on my iPhone.

The launch of the iPhone version of the Kindle software is part of Amazon's overall strategy to make its Kindle e-books available on multiple mobile devices. Availability on the iPhone gives Amazon access to a much, much bigger audience for is e-books; Apple has sold more than 17 million iPhones (that's not even counting the iPod Touch), compared with an estimated few hundred thousand Kindles, according to Fortune.

To use the Kindle app for the iPhone, download the software as you would any app from the iTunes App Store. (Store URL.) When you open the app, it will ask you for your Amazon login and password.

After a few seconds, the application displays a selection of Kindle e-books you've already bought from Amazon. I had five, which I purchased when trying out the Kindle for a few weeks in late 2007.

Hi-Res Text, Images

The reading experience on the iPhone is very good. The Kindle software uses the same elegant font on the iPhone that the hardware device uses. Turn pages by swiping with your thumb. Tap the bottom of the screen, and a tool overlay comes up that allows you to change the font size, access a chapter list, and see how much you've read and how far you have to go. Photos look much better on the iPhone than they do on the Kindle; the iPhone has a high-resolution display, the Kindle only 16 shades of black-on-gray. On the other hand, reading charts and diagrams can be a problem on the iPhone if they're meant to be viewed on a full-sized page.

Amazon lets you share books between the iPhone and Kindle hardware. It uses a network service it calls Whispersync to mark your place when you stop reading. You can read a few pages on the Kindle, put it aside, open the same book on the iPhone, and pick up where you left off. Then put your iPhone aside, go back to the Kindle, and resume reading once again in your new place.

Kindle for the iPhone is a great piece of software, with a great service behind it -- but it has a few rough edges.

While you can use your iPhone to view the annotations and highlights in e-books that you make with your Kindle hardware, you can't make annotations and highlights on the iPhone. Likewise, the iPhone software does not include the controversial text-to-speech feature of the Kindle hardware, where a computer voice in the Kindle reads text to you. Also, the iPhone app doesn't appear to offer subscriptions to magazines, newspapers, and blogs, which are available on the Kindle hardware.

Try A Free Chapter

Buying books on the iPhone is simple, but nowhere near as easy and elegant as buying e-books on the Kindle hardware.

Using Amazon's device, you can browse through a well-designed e-book bookstore until you find something that looks interesting. The press a button and download the first chapter to read for free. If you like that chapter, you can press another button to download the rest of the book. The Kindle debits your account by the purchase price -- most books are $9.99 -- and you keep reading.

The whole operation takes a few seconds and is nearly effortless. And that's a beautiful thing about the Kindle hardware -- it makes browsing for books, buying books, and reading them fast, easy, and simple. No wonder Amazon loves the Kindle; the device gently siphons money out of booklovers' pockets while they barely notice. The Kindle iPhone app copies some features of the shopping experience on Amazon's device, but not all of it. The bookstore isn't integrated with the software. To buy books on the iPhone, you have to use Mobile Safari, and the Kindle pages aren't optimized for the iPhone. The software includes a recommendation that you instead buy books on your Kindle hardware, or on the Web, and then synch them to the iPhone app. It's not hugely difficult to buy e-books on Mobile Safari, but it's far easier to do it on the Kindle hardware.

Text formatting on the iPhone can be a bit awkward, especially on the largest font setting, which can result in clumsy hyphenation and lines of text consisting mostly of white space, as the Kindle software attempts to justify the text.

But these shortcomings are small, and don't really stand in the way of a great experience. The Kindle software and service is a huge step forward in using the iPhone as a device for reading.

The iPhone was already a great device for reading, even before Amazon came along. One of my favorite iPhone apps is Instapaper (App Store URL), which is free; the Pro version, with added features, costs $9.99 (App Store URL). Instapaper works like this: You're sitting at your desk browsing headlines on your Web browser on your PC, when you come across an interesting-looking article. You'd like to read it -- but not right now. It's too long, and you don't have time. So you save the article using a bookmarklet from Instapaper.

Later, you're sitting waiting for the train. Or you're on a plane. Or you're in the doctor's office, waiting for an appointment. Now, you have lots of time. You take out your iPhone, fire up the Instapaper app, and see a list of all the articles you've saved for later. The articles are formatted for easy reading on the smaller iPhone screen.

Tap To Turn The Page

One really nice touch with Instapaper: You can scroll through articles by tilting the iPhone; Instapaper uses the iPhone's built-in tilt-sensors to control page scrolling. This is a fantastic way to read through a lot of text on your iPhone, it's much better than the standard way in other e-book readers -- including the Kindle software -- of tapping or swiping with your thumb when you want to turn a page. I hope Amazon adds this feature to the Kindle software soon.

Another great tool for reading on the iPhone: Google Reader, which has an iPhone-optimized version of its RSS reader for catching up with articles and news sites. Amazon is far from the first company to come out with an e-book reader for the iPhone. The most prominent competitor to the Kindle app is probably Stanza, from Lexcycle, which lets you read a huge library of free e-books, as well as for-pay books from FictionWise. Until last week, my major problem with FictionWise was that many of their books are protected by Digital Rights Management, to prevent pirates from copying them. I worried that FictionWise might go out of business at any moment, leaving me unable to access my e-books.

However, Barnes & Noble bought FictionWise last week, which mitigates those concerns for me.

Another problem I have with FictionWise: It offers e-books in multiple formats. They advertise that as a selling point, but I find it confusing. Which format works with which device? Which is best? I don't want to have to think about all those questions when I'm looking for something to read; I just want to read.

And another problem with FictionWise: Many of their books are sold at hardcover prices. I'm just not willing to pay $25 for a DRMed e-book from a relatively small and little-known company.

Those concerns have kept me from buying FictionWise e-books, although I did enjoy using Stanza to read a few free e-books. (I particularly recommend "The Runaway Skyscraper," a science-fiction story published in 1919, written by Murray Leinster, a writer who went on to modest fame within science-fiction circles later in the century.)

Amazon's e-books are also DRMed, but I'm willing to trust that Amazon will stay in business at least a few years. And most of the Amazon books are $9.99; I'm willing to pay that much for an e-book. The big obstacle for e-book adoption on the iPhone is the size of the device: It's very small. Most people I talk to say that they can't read a book or long article on a device that fits in the palm of their hand. In those situations, I respond, "Have you tried?" and it almost always turns out they haven't. They were so sure they'd hate reading on their phone that they never even tried.

I think if they tried reading on their iPhone, or any smartphone with an equivalent display, they'd like it. (I'm tempted to suggest they start with Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham), which deals with the theme of judging things before you try them for yourself, but actually that book is a bad choice for the current generation of e-book technologies -- too many pictures. [It's not available in the Kindle store.]

In fact, reading on the iPhone is quite comfortable -- I read articles on the iPhone several times a week, for hours at a time, and never have any problem with eyestrain. I haven't ready many books on the iPhone, mostly because of pricing, availability, and DRM -- but I've read a few, and that experience proved quite satisfactory as well.

The Amazon Kindle software for the iPhone has its flaws, but overall it's a great piece of software. Hopefully, Amazon will upgrade it quickly to smooth out its rough edges -- especially in the shopping experience. But even as is, it's a worthwhile tool for the e-bibliophile.