Amazon to make Kindle mobile
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Amazon has confirmed that books currently available for its Kindle e-reader will soon be accessible on mobile phones.
The company – which is also expected to launch a redesigned Kindle later this month – said the gadget’s books will soon be available on a variety of handsets.
It hasn’t specified which phones will be able to access the Kindle book collection, which currently rests at about 230,000 titles.
Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon, told the New York Times that it’s now working on making the dream of Kindle titles on mobiles a reality.
Google’s already announced plans to put books onto mobiles, but while the Kindle’s titles are newly released titles and bestsellers, the search engine giant’s are mainly works now in the public domain.
How popular books on mobiles will prove with bookworms remains to be seen. It’s worth remembering that much of Kindle’s appeal – and of Sony’s rival Reader range - lies in the easy-to-read e-ink display technology, which isn’t available for mainstream mobile phones yet.
That said, Stanza, an e-book reader, has been a hugely popular iPhone download.
Nintendo’s already bucked the e-ink trend and launched a catalogue of famous novels for its DS handheld console. ®
COMMENTS
Interesting - but stupid?
This strikes me as classic "we can do it, so let's do it" application of technology. I carry a load of books on my phone - but I use them to look up stuff, not for actual reading pleasure. Even having recently replaced my handset with a Sony-Ericson X1, I wouldn't fancy reading more than a few pages. I have a Sony PRS-500 which I think is just about OK for large quantities of text - but I've yet to see a phone with a good enough screen.
I work in a medical school, and we are experimenting with a variety of mobile devices in our course - but while they're OK for looking up dosages, definitions and the like, none have the screen quality for delivery anything more than small amounts of text.
