Amazon Brings Kindle App to Android

By Geoff Duncan June 29, 2010

Back in May Amazon.com promised it would release a Kindle application for Android phones and devices, and today the company made good: Kindle for Android is now available as a free download in the Android Market, and merely requires Android 1.6 or newer, so it should work on the vast majority of Android devices already on the market.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

“Our customers tell us they love the convenience of having their Kindle library with them everywhere and their reading synchronized across multiple devices,” said Amazon Kindle director Dorothy Nicholls, in a statement. “Kindle for Android and the rest of the free Kindle apps are the perfect companions for readers who don’t have their Kindle with them or don’t yet own a Kindle.”

Folks using the Kindle app can, of course, read Kindle titles and other ebooks using the application, as well an synchronize their last read pages, notes, and bookmarks between the Kindle app and Kindle devices and Kindle apps for other platforms (like the PC, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Mac). Users can customize their background and font colors, adjust text size, read in either portrait or landscape mode, and adjust screen brightness right from the app.

Kindle for Android users can also, of course, browse and search the Kindle store, which currently offers more than 620,000 ebooks: new releases and other popular books are typically priced at $9.99 or less. Users can read the first chapter of a book for free before making a purchase decision. However, Kindle for Android doesn’t yet enable users to purchase books from within the app: that’s a planned future enhancement. Amazon also plans to bring full-text searches to the Kindle app for Android in a future release.

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