Amazon has found a way around Apple's policies for purchasing content in its App Store, according to an article on AppleInsider.com. Changes to the Apple iOS terms required retailers to give Apple a 30-Percent cut of purchases made through Apple's App Store. Rather than comply, many retailers, including Amazon, chose to remove their purchase links entirely. Now, Amazon has released the Kindle Cloud Reader, a Web application that runs in a browser, featuring links that enable users to buy and download new books directly from the Web application, effectively dodging Apple's App Store and its in-app purchase policy.
According to the AppleInsider.com article, the Kindle Cloud Reader is compatible with the Mobile Safari Web browser on an iPad with iOS 4 and up, as well as the Safari browser on Mac and PC computers, and Google Chrome on a number of different devices.
The Cloud Reader application allows users to read Kindle books, and provides links to purchase and download new ones, which is no longer possible in the Apple App Store. The Kindle Cloud Reader also has an offline mode that lets users read their e-books without an Internet connection.
An Amazon press release refers to the new Web application as the "Buy Once, Read Everywhere" Kindle Cloud Reader and notes the following features:
- An immersive view of your entire Kindle library, with instant access to all of your books.
- Start reading more than 950,000 Kindle books instantly within your browser.
- An embedded Kindle Store optimized for your Web browser makes it seamless to discover new books and start reading them instantly.
- New Kindle Store for iPad is built from the ground up for iPad's touch interface.
- Your current book is automatically made available for offline use, and you can choose to save a book for reading offline at any time.
- Receive automatic software updates without the need to download new software.
- Select any book to start reading, customize the page layout to your desired font size, text color, background color, and more.
- View all of the notes, highlights, and bookmarks that you've made on other Kindle apps or on Kindle.
- Sync your last page read across your Kindle and free Kindle apps so you can always pick up where you left off.
The Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader is available at http://read.amazon.com.
- Companies:
- Amazon.com
- Apple