Amazon previews Kindle iPad app
Amazon has launched a preview page for its iPad Kindle app. The app itself takes a lot from the iBookstore, including visual page swipes and book cover navigation view (of course, to be fair Apple did "borrow" a number of things from Wil Shipley). One cool eye-candy feature of the Kindle app is that the app's developers have played around a little with Kindle's silhouetted figure reading under a tree iconography. In cover-navigation view, the sky behind the silhouetted figure will change according to what time of day it is.
The ebook war is heating up and, though early on, it looks like Apple and Amazon are going to be the two major players. Given that Amazon last week threatened smaller publishers that it will stop selling their books if they make them available in the iBookstore, it might at first seem odd that Amazon is so readily embracing the iPad. But in an age where content is king, hardware sales take a back seat to continued content sales. Amazon supporting the iPad is like giving away the razors so people have to by the blades -- and indeed Amazon has begun giving away its own Kindle hardware to its Amazon Prime subscribers to secure Kindle book sales. Who knows, in a future where multi-function tablets/ereaders will be the norm, perhaps giving away one-feature dedicated ereaders will become standard practice?
Last week Amazon unveiled its Kindle reader for Mac.
