There is a Kindle app on the iPhone which I find really useful, and something that I have been using quite a bit since I discovered it about a week ago.
The app is free and gives you access to the whole host of Kindle books on your iPhone. If you have a Kindle, it will allow you to download all your e-book purchases to your phone, in addition to the Kindle. It doesn’t allow you to download magazines or newspapers, but I may have just missed seeing that option.
The most useful feature of the app is that it stores your last read page, and when you open the book again, it opens up right where you left reading it. That’s a pretty neat feature, and I thank the designers for it every time I open a book.
The books on the iPhone Kindle don’t have a page number; instead they have a “Location†near the bottom of the screen. I still haven’t figured out what this is, but I find the lack of page numbers rather annoying. I can’t put my finger on what it is that makes me want to see a page number so much, but I really do miss them.
Another great thing about the Kindle app on iPhone is that it gives you access to a lot of free e-books. I love P.G. Wodehouse, and many of his books are free, I also found Anna Karenina and Pride and Prejudice for free, and it looks like a lot of these classics are free or really cheap on the Kindle.
This app allows you to read a preview of a book before buying it, and I like that feature too. I previewed Myth of the Rational Market by Justin Fox, and ended up buying it.
Buying something by mistake is very easy, and this is something you should be careful about. I think it happens a lot because right after you buy something, Amazon asks you if you bought it by mistake. There is an option to cancel the purchase, but I don’t know how smooth that is.
The one thing I haven’t done yet is to read an e-book on it for a few hours at a stretch. So far, I have read in short bursts, and that is quite a pleasant experience. But, I really doubt that this little screen will prove to be a good substitute for a real book on a lazy Sunday.
The app is free, and several good books on it are free too, so if you have an iPhone, this is a good app to download. I have never seen a Kindle, so I don’t know how it stacks up against that, and of course, nothing can match the pleasure of a real book in your hand (yet).
Do you know if there is an application for BlackBerry?
There isn’t one as far as I know, although it looks like a lot of people are looking for it. I say that because I saw a few forums with long threads about people discussing this. That makes me think it is only a short time before its released.
It would be a good idea to have one for BlackBerry.