Review: Kindle app for the iPhone

As a new iPhone owner, your reviewer was very happy to see the release of Kindle software for the iPhone and iPod Touch. How does it measure up against the competition?

The app itself, like most others, is purchased through the Apple App Store. It was a fairly fast download, uneventful, and of course the Kindle app is free of charge. As with most other apps, the Kindle app installed itself quickly and painlessly on the iPhone, resulting in a new icon on the iPhone home pages.

When you open the app the first time, it asks you to enter your Amazon.com account user name and password. I already had an account with Amazon, but if you don’t, I would suggest that you set the account up on the Web using a laptop or desktop machine before registering the app with Amazon. Doing so on an iPhone keyboard and screen, even using Safari, might be very tedious. With that out of the way, come back to the iPhone app and register.

The app itself is quite simple. The first screen that you see, labeled “Home,” is a list of books that you have purchased plus an “Archive” entry. As a new iPhone Kindle user, you will not see any books purchased on the home page. If you are a Kindle owner, though, all of your previous Kindle book purchases will appear, as if by magic, when you look at the archive. This list will stay up to date as you purchase more books using your Kindle.

Every previous book purchase will work on the iPhone or iPod Touch. Amazon even keeps your last-pages-read information synchronized between your iPhone and your Kindle, all transparently, so you can switch seamlessly from one to the other. This is done automatically when you synch your iPhone to your computer, and may be done manually while reading.

Buying a book from Amazon is also painless, at least if you don’t mind the prices, which seem quite reasonable to me. Like the registration of the Amazon account, buying books is easier with a full-sized browser window. It is not even possible from within the Kindle app, but it is even difficult from inside Safari. Again, I suggest buying your books from your computer and reading them on your iPhone.

The experience can even be fun. Although I bought a book the instant I downloaded the app (Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5) I bought another at coffee while showing off the app to friends. I set the iPhone in the middle of the table, home page showing, ordered a second Kindle book from Amazon on my laptop (making sure I selected the “To my iPhone” as the delivery option). Less than a minute later, the new book appeared in my book list on the iPhone. My friends were duly impressed.

The reading experience is also surprisingly pleasant. Selecting a book from the list by tapping on the title takes you to the last page you have read, or to the first page if you have not yet started to read the book. All that you see is the text of the page. Moving among adjacent pages could not be simpler. Swipe a finger left to right and the app turns to the next page. Swipe right to left, and it goes back a page.

For more options, just tap the screen. The resulting menu at the top shows the title of the book and a single navigation control: tap the “Home” button to be returned to the book menu. There are additional controls at the bottom of the page. A single tap in the middle of the screen while in menu mode will return you to reading mode.

Tapping on the “+” symbol will record the current page as a bookmark. The top two lines of all bookmarked pages will appear at on the “Location” page (see below) so that, with a single tap, you can return to a bookmarked page. This is, of course, a very handy feature.

The next menu symbol looks like a book lying open. This is the “Go To” page. From here, you can move around in the book For example, you can go directly to the cover (which is shown in color on the iPhone), to the table of contents, or back to the beginning. The actual available locations depend on the book.

You may also go to a specific location. This is done by selecting an iPhone sized page approximation numerically. In the case of Slaughterhouse 5, I can use a numeric keyboard to move directly to any page between 1 and 2938. Admittedly, this is not overly helpful, but may help to get you closer to your goal.

Under the location controls, you will find bookmarks that you have defined, identified by the text at the top of the page you bookmarked. Tapping on any of these bookmarks will take you back to that page. The title to this section also says “Notes” although I have yet to discover a way to take notes.

You may also use the “Aa” symbol to change the size of the font used to display the page. Tap on this symbol and you will see five available text sizes, with the current size highlighted. Tap any of the others and the font size being used to read will change to the size selected by your tap.

There is also a symbol which looks like the typical “Refresh” symbol on a browser.  Tapping on this symbol will manually synch the current page as the last page read, a setting that will be available to your Kindle, if you own one. This data is magically maintained on Amazon servers. Since all of your books are also available on both platforms, you never lose your place when switching between devices. A synch such as this is also performed automatically, at intervals and specific times, by the software.

At the bottom of the screen, below the other command symbols, there is a slider that will allow you to move around in the book just by dragging. It works much like the “Location” control described earlier, but may be easier to use because it is more visual, much like estimating which page you should flip to in an actual book.

That is about all for the first version of Kindle for the iPhone. What it does, it does well. Of course, there are some things that it does not yet do. By using other e-book readers on the iPhone, I have discovered that I would rather read in landscape than portrait mode. This is usually done just by turning the phone to the desired orientation. It does not work in the Kindle app.

I would also like a couple of things that come standard on the hardware Kindle: notes and search. I am a writer, and I spend a lot of time taking notes  for books that I plan to write while I am reading other people’s books. You can’t do that with the Kindle iPhone yet, though the heading name “My Notes and Marks” does hint that this functionality is coming.

I have come to regard the “Search” function as a basic right of the electronic world. Everything has a search function. My microwave has a search function. This has got to be something they just missed. I have a feeling that all of these things, plus other bells and whistles, will be available in future revisions of the Kindle for iPhone software. Surely, they did not come this far just to stop so close to their goal.

Even without these features, Kindle for the iPhone will be a rousing success. It adds so much available content for e-book reading on the mobile Apple platform that it is now worth buying an iPhone or an iPod touch for the sole reason of using it as a pocket Kindle. It will increase iPhone and Touch sales, and should vastly increase sales of Kindle book titles for Amazon, as well. Everybody, Amazon, Apple, and the reader, wins.

And it brings me one step closer to my lifelong goal. I want to have a copy of every book ever printed in my pocket at all times.

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