Amazon Should Launch a Desktop Kindle
Friday, March 13th, 2009Amazon recently launched an iPhone Kindle application that allows you to read your purchased books on the iPhone. In fact, you don’t even need to have a Kindle to use it. It seems to me that the next step would be to launch a desktop or web based Kindle interface. I can think of a lot more use cases where people would want to have access to their Kindle purchases from a computer when they might not have their Kindle available.
In other Kindle speculation, Tim O’Reilly mentioned the idea of marrying the Kindle with O’Reilly Media’s Safari book subscription service. I think this is a great idea. In fact, it’s such a great idea that if they do it I may buy a Kindle.
Call me old fashioned, but I don’t really love the idea of buying digital copies of novels, biographies, etc. I really enjoy having a printed book. I think a better model would be a “dual use sale”. If I cold buy a physical book on Amazon and pay a small charge, perhaps $2, to also have it available immediately on the Kindle that would interest me. I still want to have the physical book and I’m not interested in purchasing the content twice for different formats.
Barring a business model change in the publishing world that would facilitate that, I would love to have a Kindle for reading technical material. Books, journals, conference proceedings, etc. If Amazon can get the PDF support on the Kindle to the point where a PDF technical document looks as good as their proprietary e-books, I would buy one.
Having Kindle access to the Safari library would be similarly appealing. So much so that I expect I would buy a Kindle and subscribe to Safari if that integration were available.
