Pediatric PDA Blog

Surprisingly, Amazon decided to make their Kindle titles compatible with iPhone and iPod Touch devices! They launched the Kindle for iPhone app today and it is available from the app store. click on the icon below and the app download page will launch in iTunes.

This is certainly a great news for us because we all have [or will have] iPhone or iTouch but probably unlikely we’ll pay $360 to get a “large” device just to read books while we have all the world on our iPhones!

Amazon people could have said to themselves, Hey we not gonna win, we will not convince people to buy Kindle while they have their ebooks on the iPhone. Ok, let’s sell them the titles then!

So, quickly they established presence on app store, before iSilo and other readers take the crazily growing market from them.

So here comes another evidence of the ubiquity of iPhone devices and their precedence over other mobile systems. One would ask, why they did not think of developing an app for Palm, or Windows Mobile, or Blackberry?

Let’s have a look on how it looks on iPhone on iPod Touch;

The Kindle for iPhone app let you download whatever Kindle titles you like from Amazon.com and then send it wirelessly to your iPhone or iPod Touch. An important point here to notice is that you cannot download the titles right from your iPhone device, you have to visit Amazon.com and log in to your account.

Even the Amazon.com mobile app [icone above] will not allow us to do that! This is the same story with all publishers as they don’t want to share percentage with Apple and so they provide a free app on which we can download content from their own websites, read this post for details.

The app is absolutely free and you have to register it once downloaded so that your Amazon account get synced via Amazon whispersync technology and get all the titles [via Wifi] that you have. Also, if you ever purchased books on your Kindle you can now send them to your iPhone and iPod Touch, not only that but you’ll even return to the same page that you stopped at when you switch between devices, so this is really whispernet!

All Kindle titles can be tried for free in the form of a sample before we decide on whether to buy the book or not, which is a great advantage.

However, There are some bad features that we’d like to highlight here:

• You cannot download subscriptions or newspapers on your iPhone, this is probably because USA Today and New York Times already have their own dedicated iPhone apps so Amazon smartly avoided any confusion.
• Unlike other readers for example iSilo, Kindle for iPhone does not take advantage of the tilt G sensor and nothing happens when you tilt the device in horizontal landscape position.
• Paging is only side to side and there’s no flick scrolling up and down and so it’s missing on one of the coolest features of the smooth iPhone navigation.
• No picture zoom and no double tap magnification, again missing on these nice to have iPhone capabilities.

However, this app will certainly push more and more doctors and other people toward the iPhone and on the other hand, it will greatly expand the availability of Kindle titles in the medical field.

Currently there are over 400 pediatric titles in Kindle edition available from Amazon [ compare to this post few weeks ago ] and -of course- these are all can be read on the new iPhone and iPod Touch app. Pda4peds maintains a list of recommended pediatric titles as verified by authors and visitors have a look at the Pediatric Kindle Titles page.

Tags: kindle

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 10:36 pm and is filed under All, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.