This morning Amazon announced its new Kindle Cloud Reader. This allows you, like the Kindle or Kindle apps for other devices, to access your Kindle library from your web browser and read away. The website works with Chrome on Mac, PC, Linux, and Chromebook and Safari on the Mac, PC, and iPad.
“We have written the application from the ground up in HTML5, so that customers can also access their content offline directly from their browser. The flexibility of HTML5 allows us to build one application that automatically adapts to the platform you’re using – from Chrome to iOS. To make it easy and seamless to discover new books, we’ve added an integrated, touch optimized store directly into Cloud Reader, allowing customers one click access to a vast selection of books.”
Once you sign in, it takes you to your accounts Library with instant access to any of the books you have previously bought. You can sort and customize the view of your library to find the books you’re interested in. If you don’t already have anything of interest, you can use the Kindle Store button to hop directly into shopping the Kindle Book Store on Amazon.
Reading is pretty straight forward and similar to the Kindle App for the PC or Android. You can optimize the font size so it’s easy for you to read.
Features of Kindle Cloud Reader include:
- An immersive view of your entire Kindle library, with instant access to all of your books
- Start reading over 950,000 Kindle books instantly within your browser
- An embedded Kindle Store optimized for your web browser makes it seamless to discover new books and start reading them instantly
- New Kindle Store for iPad is built from the ground up for iPad’s touch interface
- Your current book is automatically made available for offline use, and you can choose to save a book for reading offline at any time
- Receive automatic software updates without the need to download new software
- Select any book to start reading, customize the page layout to your desired font size, text color, background color, and more
- View all of the notes, highlights, and bookmarks that you’ve made on other Kindle apps or on Kindle
- Sync your last page read across your Kindle and free Kindle apps so you can always pick up where you left off
To use the offline capability of the Kindle Cloud Reader, you’ll need to enable offline functionality by installing the Kindle Cloud Reader app in your browser. You’ll get asked this when you first sign into your account.
After you click Enable Offline, you’ll be prompted to download and install the app, saying ‘Continue’ to the download and ‘Yes’ to Install the app, you’ll end up with this little guy on your new tab window.
You can find the Kindle Cloud Reader at the easy to remember read.amazon.com.
Kindle Cloud Reader will be available on additional web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, the BlackBerry PlayBook browser, and other mobile browsers, in the coming months.