The Amazon Kindle e-book reader debuted today in Apple's iPhone App Store. Cool idea: Read a bit of a Kindle e-book on your iPhone while waiting in line at the grocery store. When you're reunited with your Kindle, you can pick up exactly where you left off reading that book on your iPhone.
In my brief test of the Kindle iPhone app, two areas for improvement became clear right away:
1. It can take a long time to download a Kindle e-book from your library onto the iPhone. One reference book took about 15 minutes to download from my Amazon.com e-book archive to my iPhone. Definitely not something you want to do when you're on the go.
2. I couldn't find a search function in the Kindle iPhone app. While this isn't necessarily a problem with fiction books, it's a big drawback for reference books. For instance, I wasn't able to search my Kindle e-book copy of Frommer's 2009 New York City guide on my iPhone, though I can search it on my Kindle 2.
Still, I love the concept behind the Amazon iPhone app, and no doubt it will be improved in subsequent updates.
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