I have been a big fan of the Kindle in the past. I have also been disappointed in some of the developmental decisions Amazon made in supporting the Kindle. I haven’t upgraded my Kindle hardware for several years because I was not impressed with the evolution of the product. Now, with the release of an HTML 5 Kindle Cloud Reader for your web browser, I’m back on the Kindle bandwagon! I recently purchased the Kindle version of Ron Hansen‘s excellent novel, Mariette in Ecstasy, and in seconds I was reading it on the web!
Buying Mariette brought me to this screen with a button that said, “Read now in Kindle Cloud Reader.” I clicked! I read. I conquered.
The book immediately loaded in my web browser: Google Chrome for Mac. I can resize the font and page width at will. I can set bookmarks. I am a sync away from reloading my wishes. As I read, I can make notes.
All my purchased Kindle books are available for download or reading live online. My Kindle library automatically loads from “The Cloud” when I visit read.amazon.com.
Here is Mariette — as a “downloaded” Kindle book plucked from The Cloud. As you read a book, it is downloaded from The Cloud to your computer.
The Kindle Cloud Reader is a “Chrome App” on my Mac — and it appears in my Apps list whenever I open an empty Tab:
It feels great to rediscover my Kindle books because I have so many of them. Kindle has now become a publishing and reading powerhouse and not just a hardware device. That’s a good thing!
I enjoyed reading my Kindle books on my iOS devices, but being able to read my books, and interact with the words of my authors in a conventional web browser, is such a rich delight that I now actually now feel as if I finally have all my books available forever. I didn’t have that sense using the Kindle book reader alone all those lonesome years, because that handheld experience always felt proprietary, fleeting and limited.