First Look: Kindle for Mac

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March 18 2010

10:37

kindleformac

Amazon has at last released Kindle for Mac, which means you can now read your Kindle books on most any device. It joins the iPhone, PC Blackberry and of course the Kindle itself.

Like the PC version, Kindle for Mac is a bare-bones reader. You turn pages with either the scroll-wheel of your mouse or the arrow keys, and it stays in sync with any other device authorized for the same account. Notes and bookmarks made on other devices can be viewed, but you can’t create new ones (a limitation shared with the PC version).

It’s pretty bad. If you want to zoom the text, for example, the standard Mac shortcuts are Cmd + and Cmd -. They don’t work. Instead you have to open a special panel which can leave a blank “cut-out” in the text after it has been closed.

It is a beta, but you only know that if you open up the “about” box. We guess its nice to have a way to read on a computer, and even better to have a local archive of your books, but I can’t help but feel that a company the size of Amazon could do better than this. Especially as it bought the quite excellent Stanza almost a year ago, which has a great Mac app along with the iPhone version.

Amazon might be happy selling books, and not care about the device they are read on. But if you carry on like this, Amazon, then people will be pushed to buy their readers, and books, elsewhere.

Kindle for Mac [Amazon]