Ben Newman: March 2009 Archives

Amazon released a free iPhone application for reading Kindle e-books only yesterday, and already a critical consensus seems to be emerging. Feature-wise, the application is undeniably spare, with no inbuilt Amazon store and no full-text search—to name just two of its deficits—but it implements enough of the Kindle’s functionality to make it a usable substitute, in a pinch. As a ploy to encourage purchases of actual Kindling, its release seems a smart move by the book giant.

I own a first-generation Kindle and an iPhone, also first-generation, and I beg to differ with these lukewarm appraisals. In every regard that matters to me, the iPhone Kindle application affords a better reading experience than the Kindle itself. I do not foresee reading another book on Amazon’s device. You can have it for the price of a good reading recommendation.