Amazon releases Kindle App for Mac OS X | Hacker News Reader

Amazon releases Kindle App for Mac OS X

9to5mac.com

I recently sold my Kindle DX because I planned to get an iPad and I was sad that I couldn't read all the Amazon eBooks I bought.

The first time I saw this headline, my reaction was: "Great! Yes! This is what I've been waiting for. Now I can just read those items."

After downloading it, I am so deeply disappointed. This app is so horrible, I would question why they released it. There's no highlighting, note taking, searching, nothing.

I question how Amazon thinks it can seriously compete with Apple & iBooks when they release things like these. Ugh.

To be fair, the Kindle iPhone app is reasonably decent for reading. I can only hope the same person?/group? that worked on the iPhone app will also work on the iPad app, so they'll still be somewhat of a competitor. Especially since Amazon does sell a lot of books :p

The Mac OS X app is just an utter disappointment, and I ended up deleting it right after running it for the first time. Wonder why they even bothered?

Completely agree. The question now is whether Apple will approve an iPad Kindle app or not.

I don't see why not, unless Amazon attempts to blatantly sell books in the app, instead of just linking you to the Amazon website like in the iPhone app. And even then, I doubt it.

No doubt Apple will make the whole book buying/reading process seamless, and make the interface appealing enough for people to want to buy books from them instead of from Amazon. I don't know many people who use the Kindle app on iPhone as their only Kindle, so to speak, while I do know lots of Kindle owners that use the Kindle app for when they don't have their Kindle around.

Lastly, given that Kindle books are mostly text and b&w images (lowest common denominator I suppose), I can't imagine Apple could feel threatened, as the iPad is larger, has a color display, and has a far larger potential for doing more interactive/immersive content, e.g. for education, no matter what Amazon tries to do.

It's comments like this that make me wonder about the wisdom of "Release early, release often". It's seems relatively clear that Amazon will address the glaring deficiencies of the app as it currently stands, but meanwhile, they're copping an absolute beating over it...

As far as I can tell you cannot:

* select or copy text

* highlight

* take notes

* search for text

Making this less useful than paper books or PDFs, which is quite a feat.

The press release - http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmV... - notes that full text search and annotation will be added in the 'near future.'

And here's the direct download link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/kindle/mac/download/ref=amb_link_15...

(warning it'll start downloading a 9MB DMG file as soon as you open the page!)

addendum: looks like the app is partially derived from the iPhone source (it uses the iPhone's standard URL scheme for launching the app... try kindle://home. I'm still trying to figure out how to launch a particular book.

Also, the Mac version uses QT extensively, and appears to feature some Growl integration.

It's pretty decent. Synced up my books that I was reading on the iPhone as expected.

Still trying to figure out where it downloads the books to.

[edit] Looks like ~/Documents/My Kindle Content

Looks like it shares some pieces from the PC version ]=

strings /Applications/Kindle\ for\ Mac.app/Contents/MacOS/Kindle\ for\ Mac | grep PC

and what is this about?

strings /Applications/Kindle\ for\ Mac.app/Contents/MacOS/Kindle\ for\ Mac | grep -i easter

FeedbackDialogWrapper::doEasterEgg

I'm far more interested in whether Apple is going to approve the Kindle app for the iPad, or whether I'm going to have to buy all my eBooks again.

There is the Kindle for iPhone, I have read few books on it already. Should work on iPad too, I assume.

They can always change their mind. I had purchased a Google Voice app on the iPhone too, until they decided to remove it and everything like it from the store.

Wow. Frustratingly you can't open ebooks on your computer.

So all of those O'Reilly ebooks I got in Kindle format won't open.

Thankfully ORA also allow me to get PDF copies of the books I bought, but it's still pretty annoying on Amazon's part.

DRM-free ebooks work with this app as they do with the PC version. I just downloaded and opened a DRM-free mobipocket file from here: http://www.feedbooks.com/book/88, so the problem seems to be specific to your O'Reilly ebook/Mac app install.

Finally. Seriously, I wonder what took Amazon so long. They got some arguably smaller platforms out quicker.

What I find surprising is how unpolished it is.

UI Redraw is slow, small feature set, UI is very crude.

The triangle of: scope, quality, time to release - it seems like this app went with: none of them.

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