Turns out you can read Kindle e-books on your iPhone or iPod touch or Blackberry – or an iPad – no Kindle required. In other words, you don’t need to own a Kindle to read Kindle e-books.
Here’s how to do it: browse to the Kindle store on Amazon via your computer and purchase a Kindle book. Then download the free iPhone or Blackberry app and, magically, your smartphone syncs with your Kindle account. Whatever books you’ve purchased are now on your phone. You can also transfer the free book samples to your smartphone.
Hey download the free sample of the Updated Edition of The Corporate Blogging Book (With a New Preface)
I installed the free KIndle iPhone app recently and am amazed at how well the books display. Even better than on the Kindle. The book covers are in full color. You can change the color of the text (white on black, black on white, or a kind of cool sepia). The table of contents is easier to read and displays less weirdly. And, as on the Kindle, you can adjust the text size. Yes, this means the books are easy to read even if you need reading glasses.
Of course, once you’ve got the Kindle iPhone app installed and your Kindle account set up, you don’t need to go back to your computer to purchase more books. There’s a great mobile version of the Kindle Store that you can access through your smartphone’s Web browser (Safari on the iPhone). You’ll see “Send wirelessly to” and then a drop-down where you can select iPhone or Blackberry, whichever you have.
So what’s the big deal about the iPhone and Blackberry – and Kindle books?
For an e-book publisher (that would be moi) it’s huge. As in well over 30 million potential e-book readers, vs. 2.5 million.
Mahalo says about 30 million iPhones have been sold to date. That means 30 million iPhone users can read my e-book, compared with only 2.5 million Kindle owners. I don’t have numbers on the Blackberry.
What idiot would read a book on an iPhone or Blackberry?
If it’s a business book that readers typically flip through, you can quickly click around in the table of contents on your smartphone to read a bit here and there. Face it: who reads every word of a business book anyway? So as e-books become more and more accepted, there may be a lot of idiots out there.
I can’t wait to publish an iPad edition…