Android phones finally have a version of Amazon's Kindle app. I have been waiting for this for a long time now, though sadly if I hadn't unintentionally found it in the Marketplace last week, I probably still wouldn't know about it.
Now that it's out, the question is whether it is any good, and even still, if it is worth a download. The whole ebook thing never really excited me at first, mostly because they were always discussed in the context of expenseive e-readers, a device which I still consider to be unecessary. I know this comes from the guy who has spent the same amount of money on portable gaming consoles, but at least those are meant to run sophistacted pieces of software. Spending hundreds on a large reading device whose sole selling point is a special screen meant to emulate the look of paper is not, in my mind, quite the same. This was especially true to me after having finally seen a Kindle in the wild, and finding that magic "e ink" technology didn't look all that different than a regular old screen.
Of course, Amazon is smart enough to know that the real money comes not in selling their e-reader, but in getting people to buy their digital books. Which is why they have made a free Kindle app for as many devices as they can. In this context, ebooks start to become a lot more appealing. I still love the feel of a real book, and I enjoy the act of going to the library, but library selections can vary wildly based on your location, and time constraints keep me from doing so as frequently as I would like. At the very least, a Kindle app could serve as a reader program for the hundreds of free classics available online.
This is exactly what I set out to do, and this weekend, I gave the Android version of Kindle a spin. While it certainly isn't' the first reader program on the OS, and also not the first I have tried, I find it so far to be the best. The main screen is pleasant, and makes it easy to find your books (it updates itself whenever it is started, so you don't have to manually refresh). Reading the books themselves is also made intuitive. You tap the sides of the screen in order to change pages (which I suppose is true for all of the different versions of the App), and the responsiveness is perfect. You can also change the size of the text, which I find to have a powerful psychological component. One one hand, I like to zoom it out a bit, so the little cell phone screen contains about as much text as a real paperback. On the other, the default size breaks each page into bite sized chunks that are easy to stay focused on. There's also a silly feature which Amazon has branded as Whispersync - whenever you finish reading, the app uploads your place in the book, so that your spot is synced up on all Kindle fueled devices you own. While I'm glad to know I could switch between my phone and my PC, I don't see myself doing it.
And now for the most important question - is it actually easy to read on a phone screen, or any screen for that matter? Lots of people believe that this isn't the case, and I agree that I struggle to read any good piece of fiction on an LCD monitor (which is why I stopped bothering to use that site that emails you a book chapter every morning). However, cell phones these days have very excellent screens, and so the e-pages jump out at you, and do a good enough job at imitating a page. Furthermore, while phone screens aren't large, they tend to be oriented like an actual book, rather than the mostly widescreen monitors we tend to use on our PCs.
I don't see myself buying tons of ebooks, but so far, I'm glad to have the option.
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