Kindle Cloud Reader

I'm a fan of eBooks. While I have a couple overflowing bookshelves, most of those tomes are older, as all of my book purchases have been electronic for several years now. The turning point was around March 2009, when Amazon released their Kindle app for iPhone. While not the most compelling form factor, the portability afforded by the iPhone app was irresistable. When the original iPad came out and Amazon published their Kindle app for it, I was completely sold. iBooks? Nook? Nah ... I'm all in with Amazon for my library.

My wife and I share an Amazon account. This has the interesting side effect of allowing us to not only share books, but share bookmarks as well (since they're attached to the book and synced across devices).

I find reading books on my iPad2 to be a compelling experience. The Kindle app just gets out of the way. No flashy animations, no UI elements ... just my book.

Amazon recently released their "Cloud Reader" (http://read.amazon.com). This is clearly a response (at least in part) to Apple's policies that disallow linking to the Kindle store to buy books (which I find to be a little bit of an inconvenience, but certainly not a deal-breaker). I say disallowing because Apple's requirement of a 30% cut isn't remotely feasible in the current eBook business model.

I decided to check out Amazon's cloud reader on the iPad and was surprised to find it to be quite comparable to the iPad app.

Here's the reading experience on the iPad app (left) versus the cloud reading app in a browser (right).

 If you could hide the browser toolbar, you'd swear you were in the local app. Gesture to swipe between pages (though not quite as smoothly as the app), change fonts, set bookmarks, and more.

Browsing your library is nice and clean, even enabling you to cache your books locally for offline reading. 

I wouldn't be surprised if we see the Kindle app go away on the iPad in favor of their cloud reader. An interesting link back to Apple's original vision of web apps on iOS.

I think Amazon has the right vision for consumption of their eBooks. I continue to be an Amazon eBook fan.