Amazon releases Kindle for OS X beta

Thanks to some great hardware design and some daringly surreptitious pricing agreements between Apple and the biggest publishers out there, Amazon’s Kindle e-reader has been feeling the pinch from the still unreleased iPad for the last few months, and it’s only going to get worse from here.

Still, the Kindle has at least one advantage the iPad doesn’t (yet): cross-platform libraries. Until (or even if) Amazon can put together a next-gen Kindle device that out-iPads the iPad, it behooves them to get their Kindle e-reading application on as many devices as possible as a stop-gap measure.

No surprise, then, that after a delay of several months, Amazon has finally brought the Kindle application to OS X. Unfortunately, it has all of the hallmarks of a panicked beta release (which is probably what it is) including some very sloppy and un-Mac-like interface design, the bizarre omission of a search function and some very swampy text rendering.

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In other words, download at the peril of your sense of clean OS X aestheticism and functional application design. Unless you don’t plan on picking up an iPad, or have a large existing library of Kindle e-books, there’s little reason to give this a go.

7 comments »

About the author

John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in News, Software |

Bill
Giving it a try at the moment. Let you know my impressions…
Bill
Well, I must say the UI isn’t all that bad. Nothing fancy, really, but it’s not an ultra basic Java interface either.
As for the search function, I must say that this is missing.
Now, first problem encountered, I can’t seem to be able to sync the furthest page I have read on one of my books. Maybe it’s a code 18, but I doubt it.
Scratch the last sentence, it worked…. After searching for about 5 minutes, but it still did work.
And reading is pretty much the same as… reading a Web page on a computer.
Really, it’s only an eBook reader after all. Nothing extraordinary there. Except that you can buy your books from Amazon and read them on your Mac now.
John
Biggest advantage to kindle: poor checking as to where you live, making it possible to get titles that aren’t available in my region thanks to lazy and stupid region restrictions in the publishing industry that would have me pirate a book rather thand find a way to let me pay for it.
John
H, and kindle for iPhone works well. Apple migt be able to block kindle for ipad as “duplicating functionality” but may have a hard time justifying that as he ipad reader is an optional download too.
Mezzrow
I downloaded it only because I have some Kindle titles I could only read on my iPhone before. And the only reason I have any Kindle books to begin with (because I hate the Kindle business model) is because there are a lot of titles for which Amazon is still the only ebook vendor. Some authors’ works are freely available in multiple formats…except their most popular titles, which you have to get as a Kindle title. I sincerely hope that once the iPad opens up the ereader frontier that the competition will force things to improve.
http://ObamaPacman.com ObamaPacman
@John,
iBooks isn’t a built in app. It’s a free download but not a built in function.
SmartyJones
It’s good to see this article. Reading a book on the iPhone but generally can’t stay with it for as long as would be the case with a larger screen.
This solves that problem. And then some. It works fine and good Amazon got it done.
Really curious what Apple does with the iPad. Would like to see a full fledged app on the iPad to read books already purchased there too.