Kindle For iPhone Now Available In 60+ Countries

You’re probably wondering what took Amazon so long. After all, the Kindle PC Reader and the international Kindle both came out in October. But it’s not Amazon’s fault. The problem is with Apple, and how Apple allows apps to be made and distributed for the iPhone. With most any other OS (Windows, Linux, Maemo, Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, DOS*), the reader software would be available everywhere you could download the day it’s released. Not so with Apple.

The funny part about this announcement is that the app has been accessible since forever. All you needed to do to get it was set up an App Store account with a US address.

Kindle DRM Is Getting Even More Frustrating

Amazon needs to work on its Kindle DRM policy, because the following story is ridiculous.

Basically, the way Kindle and the Kindle iPhone app are set up today, users have no idea how many times they can download a book, nor can they easily know how many devices can be used to read said book.

Making the situation even more confusing is the fact that the DRM information actually varies by publisher, and to find out how many times they will allow you to download a book you have to visit the legalese. Sometimes the info isn’t there, either. The worst part is this was all confirmed by an Amazon tech support person:

“How I find out (sic) how many times I can download any given book?” I asked. He replied, “I don’t think you can. That’s entirely up to the publisher and I don’t think we always know.”

I pressed - “You mean when you go to buy the book it doesn’t say ‘this book can be downloaded this number of times’ even though that limitation is there?” To which he replied, “No, I’m very sorry it doesn’t.”

As the author notes, this isn’t so bad if you’re buying a beach book or something you’ll read once and be done with it. Where it does get shitty is with reference books, which the author would like to read today, on his iPhone 3GS, and perhaps in a year, on the theoretical iPhone 4G, powered by unicorn tears. With certain books, you could be limited in such a way that your reading material does not follow your gadget’s natural upgrade cycle.

At the very least Amazon should update its policy so this info is out in the open and easily accessible. The best case scenario would be to allow consumers to actually, you know, literally own the books they’ve just bought. [Gear Diary]

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Amazon Kindle DX Coming This Summer for $489

Hot on the heels of the Kindle 2, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled an extra-large e-reader today, dubbed the Kindle DX. The 18.4-ounce device is intended to give users a reading experience closer to paper, with a 9.7-inch screen that measures 8.5 x 11 inches — 2.5 times the size of Kindle 2’s display.

This latest e-reader has a new trick — its screen can auto-rotate, so when you turn the Kindle DX on its side, an accelerometer will flip your page 90 degrees. It can now directly handle PDF files, with no need to convert them into Amazon’s proprietary format. Also new is the ability to control the line length, making the margins wider or thinner with just a few clicks. Capacity has been jacked to 4GB, though there’s still no slot for a flash-memory card. Like the Kindle 2, the DX has 3G wireless connectivity for getting content wherever you are, and the E Ink screen consumes no power except when flipping pages.

At the same time, Amazon just made a deal with three major textbook publishers to provide content for the Kindle DX: Pearson, Cengage, and Wiley. Also, five universities have agreed to pilot the DX in the fall, including Princeton, Pace and Case Western Reserve. On the newspaper front, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe plan to partner with Amazon to sell the Kindle DX at a reduced price in exchange for a subscription contract.

Shipping sometime this summer, the Kindle DX is available for pre-order today for $489.

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Amazon To Charge Per MB To Send Personal Documents OTA To Your Kindle

It’s still free of charge if you transfer the documents over via USB, and sending them to “name”@free.kindle.com will return converted files to your email address gratis. If you’re trying to be frugal, we might suggest combining all those pending transfers into one fat PDF and sending it off sometime this weekend.

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The Lord Of The Rings Now Available On Kindle Through Amazon

Amazon now has available The Lord of the Rings (Trilogy) for the kindle.  Published on April 19, 2009 by Harper Collins e-books, this digital download contains the original trilogy written by J.R.R. Tolkien.

The original series was first published in 1954 and has since been reprinted in many languages and has seen millions of copies in print form.

It has now been translated into digital form for the Kindle and is available for the Kindle through Amazon.com.

The Lord of the Rings (Trilogy)

Is Amazon Developing A Larger Screen Kindle?

With raging success, you can always count on one thing: copycats and rivals. Okay, so maybe that’s two, but you catch the drift here. Not long after Amazon launched its Kindle 2 to much fanfare, Hearst confessed that it was looking to produce a competitor with a screen that was about the size of a standard sheet of paper.

In a presumed effort to keep up with the Joneses, The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that Amazon is looking to develop yet another Kindle (something we’ve definitely heard before) with “a larger screen,” which would obviously help it appeal to newspaper companies looking to easily transition their content to a large form factor e-reader. Not surprisingly, Amazon refused to comment on the “speculation,” but the report did note that there was at least some chance that the newfangled device would debut before the 2009 holiday season.

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Amazon Kindle Now Has an iPhone App

Amazon wasn’t just teasing you whiners who blabbed on about how you’d rather just read ebooks on your iPhone: The iPhone and iPod Touch app has arrived.

The free program brings several of the Kindle’s functions to the iPod and iPhone’s much smaller, non-E-Ink screen, including the same electronic books, magazines and newspapers that Kindle owners can buy, and the ability to change text size, add bookmarks, note and highlight stuff. From what we can see at first glance of the app itself, there’s no dictionary or search.

If you already have both a Kindle and an iPhone, Amazon’s program syncs the two so that you can keep your bookmarks on both devices. Immediately after loading up the app, this worked exactly as billed, and the page we’re on in the Kindle 2 showed on the iPhone.

While my first thought was "Jesus (not Diaz), Amazon’s bent on cannibalizing itself," I guess the move kind of makes sense. People who want E-Ink will still buy the Kindle 2 (reviewed here), but perhaps this will steer people away from the other multitudinous, less complete iTunes ebook options. [iTunes Link to Amazon Kindle App]

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The Kindle 2 Gets Disassembled

Once again, the guys at ifixit have gotten their hands on a shiny new gadget just to tear it apart. However, they did discover some interesting bits of information about the build.

•The Kindle 2 sports a 532 MHz processor, clocking in faster than an iPhone 3G. Amazon used a 90nm ARM11-based Freescale MCIMX31L multimedia processor.

•The interior of the Kindle 2 is very functional, but not as aesthetically balanced as some of the devices we’ve disassembled.

•We demonstrated the E-Ink display’s persistence by completely disconnecting the screen from the battery. The content on the screen remained crystal clear even though there was no power to it.

•Pound for pound, it’s more expensive than the MacBook Pro 17″ Unibody we took apart last week, since the Kindle 2 weighs only 10.2 ounces.

•As many have reported, the text-to-speech was remarkably clear and surprisingly listenable.

•The Kindle 2 is thinner than the iPhone 3G, but a hair thicker than an iPod Touch.

•Completely disassembling the Kindle 2 is simple once the case is opened — we removed only 26 screws and disconnected four connectors.

Head on over to ifixit for the full break down in all its gory detail. [ifixit]

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Will e-book readers make your library obsolete?

Source: MobileRead Networks