I've recently become hooked on yet another emerging technology... The eBooks phenomenon as delivered through Amazon's Kindle platform.
Not so much the Kindle itself... I remain unimpressed at it's design and limited versatility. But Amazon had the brilliant idea to put a Kindle application on the iPhone, and that's where I found and fell in love with it.
Amazon has added a PC based Kindle Reader as well that I can use through Parallels on my MacBook Pro... they say a native Mac version will be out shortly.
So here's what's so great about all this. Whenever I open a book on either my iPhone or my computer, the application syncs to the last point I was reading at, regardless of which device was involved. If I spent last evening in my Windows 7 virtual machine reading Clive Cussler and I now find myself at the car dealership getting my oil changed, all I need to do is open Kindle on my iPhone, select the Cussler book if need be (if it was the last one I was reading, it will automatically load) and click the Sync button.
They've put in some great user interface/interaction stuff as well. You can bookmark any page just by clicking a Plus icon on the bottom of the screen. The page will display with the top right corner turned down, a familiar enough metaphor! We've seen this in other applications, but it is great on an iPhone.
The iPhone version - which is free - also offers choices on how to view the page. My preference is Sepia, which softens the black text (which is also resizable) against a faint sepia colored background as opposed to a bright white. Weirdly, it "feels" more familiar that way, in any light.
Turning pages can either by done by dragging your finger or just tapping anywhere along the edge of the screen; right side for forward, left for back a page. It just could not be easier.
But the best part of the whole experience, where Amazon took a page from Apple's model, is the Kindle store on the iPhone. Sitting in the airport with nothing to read and a four hour flight coming up? Jump into the Kindle store on the iPhone and select just about anything either by viewing the latest releases or doing a search for title, author, whatever. Most eBooks are about $10, some less, some a bit more. Make a selection, click the button, and the book downloads damn near instantly.
Today I happened across a new Joseph Wambaugh novel that will be coming out in about two weeks. I ordered it on the spot, and on the official release date it will just appear in my Kindle library. How much better can it get?
----------------------------------------------
To add one more personal tech wrinkle to this whole thing: I've been looking around for awhile for a way to write stuff like this, or technical stuff for business, or whatever, on my iPhone. This week I've been playing around with Google Wave, and it occurred to me this morning that here was exactly what I needed. I am writing this whole thing as a new Wave to myself on my iPhone. When I go to my computer later, I can edit or just copy this text out of that Wave and stick it wherever it needs to go: in this case, into my weblog software, and it will become a blog entry in a heartbeat. Google is positioning Wave as a collaborative tool, and I'll be damned if it doesn't work great for collaborating with yourself!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment