Kindle for PC | Amazon's Future as a Digital Distributor
Bookworms around the world, rejoice! Amazon’s Kindle for PC is now available, making over 360,000 books only a click away for millions of PC owners worldwide. Announced during the Windows 7 launch event, Kindle for PC has now been released as a beta program today.
Amazon sparked worldwide interest in the eReader market, which is now an increasingly crowded market where the Kindle competes with the Sony Reader, Barnes & Nobel’s Nook, Plastic Logic’s Que, and more. Barnes & Noble and Sony both offer programs to read ebooks from their stores on your computer and 
other devices. Amazon initially only offered the Kindle program as an iPhone app, but they have now expanded and plan on supporting more platforms in the future. Similar to Microsoft’s Zune, which is a device, a store, and a program for Windows, Kindle is now simply an eBook ecosystem that works with its standalone eReader as well as iPhones, PCs, and more.
Kindle for PC sports a clean, simple UI that integrates nicely with Windows 7 (including support for jumplists and multi-touch on new touch-screen computers) and allows you to easily read your favorite books. After downloading the program, which works on Windows XP, Vista, and 7, you simply sign in with your Amazon account name and password. If you already own a Kindle device or use Kindle on an iPhone, Kindle for PC will automatically download your books complete with your bookmarks, notes, and current reading location in the book. Otherwise, you will be presented with an empty interface that shows helpful popups to highlight Kindle’s features.
New Kindle users will want to purchase an ebook or download a free one from Kindle’s store, and Kindle for PC offers easy access to this on the right hand side of the toolbar. Rather than offering in-app access to Amazon’s Kindle Store, the “Shop in Kindle Store”
link simply opens Amazon’s Kindle site in your browser. However, it is very easy to purchase and download a book; if you are logged into your Amazon account, simply click “Buy it now with 1-Click,” and select the device you wish to send the book to (select your PC if you want to read it on Kindle for PC).
Once you have downloaded books, your Kindle interface will display your new digital library. Full color covers allow you to easily find the book you want to read, and you can easily sort your library by author, title, and most recently downloaded. Kindle makes it easy to read books, and allows you to quickly and dynamically change the font size and amount of words per line. Chapters appear as links in the table of contents, so you can easily go to the chapter you want to read. Pages scroll fast and smoothly, and work with multi-touch gestures if you have a touch screen or touchpad. Kindle will automatically remember where you left off reading, and will sync this with all of your devices (including multiple computer or Kindle devices) via Whispersync. Once you are finished with a book you can archive it to save space on your computer, which will then remove them from the computer and make them available for download from Archived Items.
In a strange shortcoming, Kindle for PC is missing several crucial features that are standard on the Kindle eReader and the iPhone app, but Amazon promises to add them in upcoming releases. These include the ability to create notes and highlights, search inside a book, and zoom and rotate images. While you can transfer PDF eBooks to the Kindle device via a USB cable or by emailing them to it, Kindle for PC only lets you read books from the Kindle store. Magazines, Newspapers, and Blogs, all available by subscription on the Kindle device, are not available on the PC (though this is technically not a problem, since you can always read them for free in your browser!). It also lacks the ability to select and copy text, and it does not have an option to print ebooks either. These last limitations may be to reduce the potential of piracy, but they also reduce the functionality of the program. Hopefully Amazon will address these things in upcoming releases as well.
Amazon is well on their way to transforming themselves for a store for physical items to a digital marketplace of digital goods, and Kindle for PC is yet another sign of this. With their MP3 and Video store, game and (some) software downloads, and cloud computing services, they are definitely a leader in digital distribution. And since their digital products are available on an increasing array of devices, they can benefit from a wide potential customer base.
So what are you waiting for? Download Kindle for PC now
Edit: I reviewed Kindle for PC on a standard computer (using a keyboard + mouse), but here’s a review of how Kindle for PC worked on a HP TouchSmart tx2. Great to see it from all perspectives!
Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.