Amazon.com has released a free Kindle application for the PC with a promise to release a Mac version soon. For those who aren’t familiar with the Kindle, it started out as an electronic book reader about the same size as a large novel. It has a crisp easy to read black and white display and can download books from Amazon’s Kindle store. The PC version allows you to read books from the Kindle store on your PC and, if you have one, also sync with your Kindle.
If you live in the USA the Kindle PC application is great news. The Kindle store offers over 360,000 books, including most of the New York Times Best Sellers for just $9.99 (about £5.99). You can also get newspapers like The Washington Post or even UK papers like The Times. There are also hundreds of free Kindle books like the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and so on.
But if you live in the UK, the Kindle PC software isn’t so good. First of all not all the books are available. But worse than that, the free books are no longer free. Having installed the Kindle software, naturally the first thing you want to do is download a book and see what it is like to read it on the PC. There is a nice little “Shop in Kindle Store” button on the tool bar which opens a browser in the Kindle section on Amazon.com’s web site. But when I searched for free books I discovered that for me they cost $2.30 (about £1.35)
I did manage to cheat the system for about 4 and a half minutes. I told Amazon that I lived in the USA and I was able to start downloading the books that are free to US users. I got seven books downloaded and then on the eighth Amazon had worked out that my IP address isn’t in the USA and told me that I was downloading stuff from another country and now I would have to pay the $2.30 if I wanted any more.
If Amazon want me on board, they are going to have to bribe me. Give me free books, make me want to buy a Kindle device and sure, after that, I will start to spend money. But I am not willing to try out a concept to see if I like it and have to pay for it at the same time.
If you want the Kindle software you can get it here. If runs on Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later, or Windows Vista or Windows 7.
3 thoughts on “Kindle For PC Out; Mac Version Coming Soon”
I downloaded it yesterday and gave it a try. It does have a lot of work to go, but I like the idea and I hope to see a lot of improvements in the future. But it’ll be nice to throw some free books into it as well as some things from around the web.
Thanis for the post but how do they make money if they give away books for free and can they do that?