Kindle Cloud Reader

Amazon today announced the availability of its Kindle Cloud Reader solution, a web app for accessing your purchased Kindle content and, perhaps as important, new eBooks via the Amazon Kindle eBook store.

You may recall that Amazon and other content providers had to recently change its app iPad/iOS in order to meet Apple's onerous requirement that the Cupertino consumer electronics giant gets a 30 percent cut of any revenues generated through such apps. This new web-based Kindle reader neatly bypasses that issue, and not coincidentally there is an iPad-specific version of the web app. There's also one for Google Chrome and the desktop version of Apple Safari, which works on Windows or the Mac. Here's a typical book displayed through this web app:

Amazon notes that Kindle Cloud Reader automatically synchronizes your Kindle library, as well as your last page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights for all of your Kindle books, as with all Kindle native apps. It also includes the following features:

• An immersive view of your entire Kindle library, with instant access to all of your books
• Start reading over 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

Kindle Cloud Reader is available for Safari on iPad, Safari on desktop and Chrome starting today. You can find out more about this new Kindle app version on the Kindle Cloud Reader web site.