It’s official: Kindle is coming an Android phone near you sometime this summer.
Kindle is already available on the iPhone, iPad, and BlackBerry, but Android will join the mobile lineup in the next few months. The free app comes with all of the features you’d expect in a Kindle app: access to Amazon’s half a million e-books, automatic sync of bookmarks, notes, and highlights, and the ability to read books in portrait or landscape mode.
While Kindle for Android seems very similar to its iPhone and iPad counterparts, it does come with an additional feature: the ability to buy books through the app itself. iPhone and iPad users currently have to buy Kindle books via the Safari mobile web browser because Amazon doesn’t want to give up 30% of its book sales to its new e-book rival.
There still aren’t a lot of details about Kindle for Android, but Amazon has created a landing page where Android owners can sign up for updates on the app. Oh, and for those with older Android phones, there’s good news: Kindle for Android works on phones running Android 1.6 or better.
With Apple and other book retailers challenging Amazon’s dominance of the e-book market, the world’s largest online retailer is responding by spreading its virtual library onto as many platforms as possible. It’s all part of a chess game between Apple and Amazon for control the e-book market.
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Tags: amazon, android, Google, Kindle
