Amazon continued to expand the reach of its e-book reader the Kindle yesterday with an announcement that books can now be read in its Kindle Cloud Reader.
The new program allows you to read books from on or off line using the Chrome or Apple Safari browser. Using HTML5, the cloud requires no installation to use (unless you don’t have Chrome installed, that is).
Your entire Kindle library shows up on a virtual bookshelf. There are two buttons — one for Web-based “cloud” reading and one for offline reading.
The reader automatically downloads the books you’ve read most recently.
CNET and others this morning note that Kindle Cloud Reader is in part a response to Apple’s recent App store change requiring publishers and book sellers to strip out links to their own stores or other means of selling their own products.
As CNET notes: “The Kindle Cloud Reader has a link to the Kindle Store, something that’s now missing from the Kindle apps for iPad and iPhone.”
Taylor says
Just wish this worked for non-Amazon books I have on my Kindle, but not my Kindle account! Very nice otherwise, though, and helps make a Chromebook even more useful.