Amazon has just expanded the potential audience for its ebook format by a few orders of magnitude with the Beta release of its free
Kindle for PC application. Doing exactly what it says on the (imaginary) tin, this will allow you to read the locked-down Kindle format on your Windows weapon of choice, though Mac users are left with merely the "coming soon" message you see above. Given that you'll now be able to consume Amazon's ebooks on your PC
and iPhone, there's a risk that people might entirely sidestep the
Kindle and Kindle DX for more familiar hardware, but clearly the company is willing to undertake it in order to get its wares out to a wider client base. We still think Amazon should
do away with the proprietary madness and utilize a common standard like
ePUB, but until then we can at least appreciate being given the ability to sync our
Robinson Crusoe read across a few more devices than before.
