Amazon’s Kindle for Mac software is hardly new, but the free e-reading app has just hit the Mac App Store… and quickly soared up the charts, becoming the fifth most popular app in the free section.
It’s enough to make you wonder where the heck the Mac version of iBooks is. Amazon’s destroying iBooks by pursuing a strategy of ubiquity across many devices. Buy a Kindle book once and you can read it on a Kindle, an iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7, Windows, Mac, or BlackBerry device while maintaing your bookmarks and notes across all platforms. Meanwhile, iBooks remains unloved and limited to iPhone and iPad, while not being nearly as full-featured as Kindle’s software.
It’s disappointing. When Apple debuted iBooks and iPad, we were positive that the combined force of both Apple’s e-reading software and their new tablet were going to absolutely destroy the Kindle platform… but if anything, Amazon’s only increased their domination over the e-reader market since the iPad’s release, thanks to the excellence and ubiquity of their software. If Apple was serious about e-books, you’d think they’d at least make sure their iBooks software was available on all of their own operating systems.
