Using my iPhone as a Kindle

March 4, 10:39 PMPhiladelphia Technology ExaminerMelissa Thiessen

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I am a bookworm, always have been. I was the kid who got in trouble for reading under the sheets with a flashlight when I was supposed to be asleep, or for reading a book instead of doing my homework. I still am a voracious reader when I have the time. I love the feel of a book, and the act of turning pages while devouring a physical book.  However, the recent reviews of the Kindle 2 from Amazon have given me pause to reconsider my general dislike of e-books.

There is one small problem with my desire to check out the Kindle 2 based upon the rampant reviews all over the internet. I can't afford one. I do, although, have a first generation iPhone, that I am very attached to.  I love my iPhone, which is named Fozzie (all of my computer equipment is named after Muppets), and am constantly trying out new applications. The free Kindle application for the iPhone, while it is meant to sync between your Kindle and your iPhone, allows me to try the Kindle interface without putting out the money for the actual Kindle ha

Home screen for Kindle iPhone application

Example of book and menu in Kindle application

The web interface for the Amazon Kindle store is easy to use, and as soon as I had logged into my Amazon account on the app on my phone, my phone's name showed up on the 1-click buying pull-down menu for the Kindle store. I quickly purchased three free e-books.  There are many free books on the Kindle store site, the majority of which are classics or romance novels. Once purchased via the 1-click method, a page loaded telling me that my purchases would show up on my phone the next time I loaded the Kindle app. Over the Edge network, it took a few minutes to download my purchases, but not long at all.

As shown above on the left, purchases show up on the home screen, and then can be clicked on to show the text, as shown to the right. When you touch the screen, the menu shown pops up on the bottom. The menu allows you to mark the page (the plus sign), go to a specfic part in the table of contents (the book icon), increase or decrease the font size (the AA icon), or go to the furthest page you've read on any of your synced devices (the syncing arrows icon). Pages can be "flipped" using the finger slide used on many other applications on the iPhone, such as Photos.

I'm intrigued to try the magazine subscription service via the Kindle store, such as the New Yorker. So far, the experience with the Kindle iPhone app works well with the iPhone UI, and seems like something I would use while on the train commuting or waiting in line while out running errands without worry about carrying a paperback around.