Well, Apple’s iProfit philosophy prohibits companies from selling content within their apps unless Apple gets a 30 per cent cut. Amazon didn’t want to pay the tariff so they updated the existing iPad and iPhone Kindle apps removing the eBooks store. The new Kindle Cloud Reader, however, has a button that opens the Amazon site in a browser on your device, cunningly sidestepping Apple’s in-app selling rules.
That all sounds very clever. The trouble is, it’s nothing the original Kindle apps on various platforms didn’t do already. If you have the old app on your iPad and on your PC, for instance, if you buy a book on one device you can read it on the other and your bookmarks are preserved just like with the Cloud Reader.
Maybe you’re wondering if Amazon has made reading with the Kindle Cloud Reader a more heavenly experience? A new app with new features, perhaps? Nope. On the iPad the page turning action is actually slightly less rewarding than it was on the old Kindle app. (Note: Apple’s iBooks app is even better in terms of user experience, but you can’t use it for Kindle eBooks.) So, the Kindle Cloud Reader is not quite as nice to use and the only tangible difference is that there’s a button opening the Kindle Store in a web browser. Upon closer inspection the key benefits of the Kindle Cloud Reader are, as its name suggests, little more than vapour.
Kindle Cloud Reader is free and can be found here.