Kindle for Android now available | Hacker News Reader

Kindle for Android now available

techcrunch.com

36 pointsandrewpbrett14 comments

Does anyone know why this app needs to read the Phone state? According to the Android documentation it's used for location, monitoring incoming calls, and SMS. I can't think of any reason Amazon would need that information to let me read books?

I would guess they need it to call TelephonyManager.getDeviceId as part of their DRM device authorization scheme: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/Tel...

Or maybe they change their sync settings (for "Whispersync") based on your network status.

I bet it has to do with the whispersync. Also, it could be to cover their asses-people associate whispersync and data with phone sync.

Good, glad it came up here. I was looking forward to this, but I'm getting total corruption on all of my books. I tried uninstalling and re-downloading the books and tried more than 10 different books. All come up scrambled and crash the app like so:

http://i48.tinypic.com/fcmmq8.jpg

Apparently this is a bug in Cyanogen mod - http://code.google.com/p/cyanogenmod/issues/detail?id=1663#c...

I'm interested in this, since my phone is my favorite book reader. The best app I've found so far for reading on Android is Aldiko ... and it's quite good: I'd be interested to see a comparison. The linked article is not particularly enthusiastic.

(Min version is 1.6 -- I'm going to have to upgrade my phone somehow before trying it out.)

It's a rather incomplete app at this point on Android. They clearly didn't anticipate how quickly Android would grow.

Not available for some countries, had to switch with a global sim so I could download. Also for Project Gutenberg books you have to search for them by name (meaning you can't browse free books) and on top of that you actually have to purchase them for $0. I'm not that much into buying ebooks but this crappy UX definitely won't help on me becoming one. Luckily there are other options on the Android Market.

It's great to finally have this available but I've gotten pretty comfortable with Aldiko and epubs while waiting for this.

Aldiko is one of the best around, on any platform.

Interesting suggestion, but why does Aldiko need my location?

Anybody knows why you newspapers, magazines and blogs are currently not available? I own a kindle, and the only reason i would really need a mobile reader is for the magazines.

It seems like a licensing issue. Periodicals aren't available on any of the non-Kindle device platforms, IIRC.

I've observed this on my laptop and iPad. Subscription content is only available on the Kindle hardware.

Sadly, this means I'll probably be canceling my NY Times subscription next month, as the free iPad app offers enough content to make the $20/month Kindle-only sub pretty unappealing.

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