Amazon’s Kindle enters the iPad scene

Posted by Mauricio Longo in General, Publishing on Mar 22nd, 2010 | 0 comments

Amazon has come out and presented its Kindle App for Tablet computers (including the iPad).  It seems that Jeff Bezo’s company lost no time in jumping right in and rushing to meet Apple’s challenge to its position in the ebook reader market.  The company made available images of its application on its website along with a description of what is new.

The first pictures show an application which looks pretty good and makes good use of the screen colors available.  The main library screen uses the Kindle’s trademark silhouetted figure under a tree as the background for large cover pictures.  This  picture changes to mirror the time of day in which it is being looked at, which would seem to indicate that Amazon is determined to make sure that it doesn’t get pegged as “the old timer” with its black and white books.

In fact Kindle ebooks will be able to display in full color as well, which is also sure to be a welcome and refreshing change for regular consumers of Amazon’s ebook editions.  The application is said to have been entirely redesigned to take advantage of the resources available in tablet devices such as color and a much higher rate of screen refresh than is available on the company’s own eInk based Kindle reader.

The Kindle application was demonstrated to a reporter and is described in an article in the New York Times.

UPDATE: It seems that users will be able to purchase books directly from the Kindle application and the same will probably be true for the eReader application from Barnes & Noble.  It would appear that Apple left iBooks out of the core functionality of the iPad, as a downloadable app exactly so that it would conflict with these applications under the terms of its license to developers.

*Images: Amazon.

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