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The Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader is live
- fpgeek 15y agoWonder why they decided to change the name from "Kindle for Web"? OP, please fix the spelling in the title. I find it very irritating.
- fpgeek 15y agoWow, they support Chrome and Safari, but not Firefox. Time to spoof my user agent and see if it really doesn't work or not... Update: Even user-agent spoofing didn't make a difference with Firefox.
- cageface 15y agoLooks like they're using Web SQL for local storage. Mozilla foolishly (IMO) rejected this standard so they'd have to reimplement the storage layer with IndexedDB to get this working on FF.
- wycats 15y agoWebSQLDB isn't really a "standard". The standard is "whatever version of sqlite safari happened to ship with" which is really not a tenable long-term solution.
- cageface 15y agoSure it is. Pick a version. Call it the spec and fork SQLite if necessary. You can't possibly argue that this would be more work than inventing a new, untested data storage model from scratch. This approach is exactly what ran the W3C aground in the first place.
- zds 15y agoThe innovation in web apps that Apple spurred by their payment restrictions is going to be good for everyone. The Financial Times' excellent iPad app has now been replaced by an equally impressive web app. Amazon's Kindle Cloud Reader is almost as responsive as the native app. I'm almost ready to switch to it. Should be interesting to see how this affects the number of books they sell.
- fpgeek 15y agoThey're highlighting their new iPad-optimized Kindle Store for Tablets. That is clearly a shot back at Apple for the recent "eBookstore Armageddon". Given how close they were to releasing their web app, I'm a little surprised that they didn't play more hardball with Apple, though.
- cageface 15y agoThis is one more reason why I'm happy I'm not locked into a single-platform store like iBooks.
- bryanlarsen 15y agoSadly, I think many will miss your irony.
- cageface 15y agoNo irony intended, actually. Although the emphasis on the iPad here shows how successful Apple has been at making this a one-platform market either way.
- bryanlarsen 15y agoDouble irony, then. Whether you read on the web or a Kindle e-reader or on your iPhone, you're still locked to the single Kindle platform. I must admit that my many Kobo purchases aren't much better. I'm not locked to the Kobo platform, but I am locked to Adobe DRM.
- cageface 15y agoI can now read Kindle books on any computer with a reasonable browser. I can't even read iBooks on my Mac. I prefer O'Reilly-style DRM-free PDFs, but at least I don't have to own an iDevice for the rest of my life to read my ebooks.
- bdickason 15y ago
- ComputerGuru 15y agos/Kindel/Kindle/ It's a pretty grating misspelling. Thank you.
- jerrya 15y agoIt's a very nice app. Thank you Amazon. I hope O'Reilly and Safari Books Online take note. I use Safari but its web app to read the books is so slow as to make the whole experience painful and doesn't provide nearly the value it could. It also seems to be very Microsoft IE optimized and basically lets you read one and only one book at a time, regardless of whether you have a post 2005 tabbed browser or not.
- pw 15y agoYeah, I was sorely disappointed when I tried Safari. Great selection, but the interface is horrible. And they make it very hard to cancel your subscription. I expected better from O'Reilly. (It's actually a joint venture between O'Reilly and Pearson, which explains a lot. Still, it's a blight on O'Reilly's otherwise stellar reputation.)
- pieter 15y agoNice. Now, if they'd just drop their surcharge for ordering ebooks in mainland Europe I might actually use it. Paying $3-%5 extra per book just because I live somewhere else doesn't make sense with ebooks.
- davidw 15y agoI wonder if there's a way to fudge this by registering the Kindle with a US company/address or something like that. The problem is that to set up a service like that would cost money and... you'd end up having to pay to use it, so you're back at square one.
- oemera 15y agoI'm from Germany and I have heard from people who have registered their account with a address in the united states and a valid credit card which is also registered to a guy living in the united states. If you can do this you can buy from the american kindle store and you are paying for the same books less money than european customers. I hope they will get this right without a hack in the future.
- thisisfmu 15y agoIt works even with a US delivery address in your account that is separate from a possibly non-US billing address. You can simply switch back and forth the country in your profile to optimize for catalog availability and pricing.
- 77ko 15y agoI'm in Pakistan where Amazon doesn't even sell Kindles or books. The way I bypass that is to go to my Amazon account on their website, and set my country as US. I have been buying books from the American kindle store and paying using a non-US credit card and it works just fine, have been doing so for over a year.
- dnlk 15y agoHmm, I am from Germany, too. I don't have a Kindle, but I use the Android and other Kindle Apps and I have purchased several books and even a magazine subscription using my german credit card (and never gave them an additional address in the states). Also, I can sign into Amazon.com using my german Amazon account, I don't remember when they changed this, but at some point it just worked. I am not going to move to the German Amazon Kindle Store, as for example that magazine subscription is not available in the German Kindle store. To me, that is the real problem at hand (besides the fact that they shouldn't expect you to pay the same amount of money for a digitally distributed version as you would have to pay for the dead tree version, but that's a totally different issue, which has already been discussed a lot).
- forcer 15y agoIt shows only books downloaded to the 1st Kindle associated with particular account. Anyone knows how to display books from all Kindles on that account?
- ghshephard 15y agoShows books associated with all of my devices. Or, to be more accurate, all of the books I have purchased, in archive or on a device, are present. Including seven (7) unique copies of the Amazon Kindle Guide.
- davidw 15y agoSo... you can't cut and paste from it. Anyone want to dig in and look at how it's implemented? They must be fairly confident that people aren't going to use it to rip books off.
- ghshephard 15y agohttp://www.free-ocr.com/ http://www.free-ocr.com/, or, I guess any OCR tool will do a job. But then - people could always have done (and probably did) that with a physical book, so, I'm not sure whether it would be worth it to make it more difficult to do with the digital book.
- corin_ 15y agoWell if someone created the software to do it, you could rip digital books automatically - not quite as easy to do with paper books, what with having to scan all the pages (possibly after first unbinding the book).
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoYou can pretty easily create a page-flipper with an arduino board.
- sien 15y agoThey are probably fairly confident that isn't worth the hassle for most people. You could already do the same with the Kindle app on the PC at any rate. There are also scripts for breaking the encryption on Kindle files already.
- ericmoritz 15y agoThe text on the page is actually text. It's just a matter off time before someone writes a greasemonkey script to enable cut and paste.
- jonburs 15y agoThe misspelling in the title is quite intentional -- cek is Charlie Kindel, former GM of Windows Phone Developer Experience (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2860646 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2860646). It should also be said that he's a great guy that I've known for more than a decade. Anyone who's interested in taking part in an early stage Seattle startup should definitely send him a message. Well, on LinkedIn or Twitter or Google+ I guess -- Charlie, please add contact info to your HN profile! [Edit] Looks like the title spelling has been corrected...
- davidw 15y agoHe probably writes Kindel a lot more than Kindle and has it hard wired into his fingers.
- cek 15y agoWhen I posted this link to twitter I did intentionally mis-spell it (my tweet was "Oh, wow. The Amazon Kindel (er, Kindle) Cloud Reader is live: http://bit.ly/pBoMhS http://bit.ly/pBoMhS. But, When I pasted it here to share on HN, I removed the "(er,...)" and MEANT to fix the original. My apologies for not doing that. Glad someone at HN was able to fix it. @jonburs - My contact info IS in my HN profile, not sure why it's not showing up.
- veidr 15y agoWow. For reading, that is incomparably better than the (admittedly horrid) Kindle for Mac native application. If this gains a search feature, I cannot imagine ever launching the native app again.
- cageface 15y agoAgreed. This is impressive. There are fewer and fewer reasons to write native apps it seems. Any ideas what frameworks were used to build this?
- pw 15y agoThis is wonderful. My one gripe with Kindle books was that I couldn't access them from my Ubuntu workstation. Because of that, I actually purchased a second copy of some titles from the Google eBookstore or resorted to pirating a PDF. It doesn't look like you can highlight passages, though. And the lack of copy and paste, while understandable, will surely be grating in a desktop environment.
- bergie 15y agoI've been running Kindle for PC on Wine, but this web app is definitely nicer.
- smhinsey 15y agoI would love to see this synchronize with the "collections" feature on the DX (not sure if all models have it). Otherwise, this is excellent.
- nextparadigms 15y ago"Optimized for iPad: shop the integrated Kindle Store for Tablets" I was expecting this for a few months now, especially after Apple wanted to introduce that policy of theirs where they wanted a %30 cut. Amazon is not taking any chances with Apple anymore. Good for them. All content providers should use web-apps.
- mfringel 15y agoWeb apps sacrifice offline operation. I can't say I'd be totally sanguine about that, specifically with content providers.
- Derbasti 15y agoThis one doesn't. It works just fine offline.
- anigbrowl 15y agoYou can cache stuff offline with HTML 5. My tablet is wifi-only (didn't want to spend 100$ on an overpriced data plan) and this works fine with it. Google Books also has an 'available offline' option, BTW. I can't quite decide which I prefer.
- estel 15y agoThe only thing I've found missing are keyboard shortcuts to navigate the book? Or am I just trying the wrong keys?
- maguay 15y agoThe left and right arrows on the keyboard work for me in Safari, though only after first clicking the next arrow on-screen.
- stralep 15y agoThe Amazon KINDEL Cloud Reader is live...
- stralep 15y agoOK... It's fixed now
- jrockway 15y agoSo is this the end of DRM on Kindle books? Because it works fine in Chromium, which I have full access to the source code for. That means I can make it do anything, including dump out the text that I'm looking at. I dug around a little bit and found that it's storing its data in a sqlite database in ~/.config/chromium/Default/databases/https_read.amazon.com_0/2 (there's an index of what's in what database in ../Databases.db). I did a "select * from fragments", found some things that look like data URLs representing images, pasted them into my browser and yup... those are the pictures from the book I'm reading. So, DRM fail. As for the text of the book, I see some words from the book surrounded by garbage. So if this is encryption, it's pretty bad. Excerpt: ⟳As➁⨋0⫪⟳I➁⨋0⬀⟳exit,➁⨋0⭂⟳I❪➖⨋0⭍⟳⡿❪➖⨋0⮥⟳m➁⨋0⮻⟳⢞⥞ys➁⨋0Ⰸ⟳⢵refu "As I exit, I'm careful..." Next step is to look for the source code that implements this and see what those garbage characters are doing.
- ristretto 15y agoTo be fair, you can find tons of kindle books for free in torrents and on the internet anyway, amazon doesnt stop you even from copying them to your kindle. I m sure amazon and even the authors are aware of those limitations and are focusing on a better experience readers would be willing to pay for.
- officemonkey 15y agoI think Amazon has mostly learned the mistakes of the record labels made. They realize if they go hog-wild on the DRM that the public are just going to go the torrents. The rest of the publishing industry occasionally forgets and does dumb stuff (like get pissy over the text-to-speech function in order to protect their audiobook profits). In fact, I won't be surprised if DRM is eventually dropped from eBooks you buy.
- joe42 15y agoThe textbook renting service Kindle introduced last month depends quite heavily on DRM. I verified recently that I can "rent" a book for, say, 30% of its "buy" price, remove the DRM, and be left with a DRM-free book (not limited to a month rental).
- kia 15y agoWTF??? They don't support two most popular web browsers. Firefox 5: "Your web browser isn't supported yet. Download Chrome or Safari below." IE9: "Your web browser isn't supported yet. Download Chrome or Safari below."
- cageface 15y agoComplain to Mozilla for being too pig-headed to support Web SQL.
- JeremyBanks 15y agoWeb SQL's abandoned now and Mozilla supports its successor, IndexedDB. Hopefully Amazon will support that too, before too long.
- cageface 15y agoWebSQL was abandoned because Mozilla refused to support it for (IMO) spurious reasons. IndexedDB support is uneven at best in modern browsers. Amazon chose (rightly, again IMO) to use something that works and is available now. Mozilla is reaping the benefits of their nonsensical stance here.
- Andrex 15y agoI wouldn't say the reasons were entirely unfounded. The biggest one seemed to be that Mozilla did not want to reverse engineer SQLite to conform to the spec (and yes, that was in the spec.) It did seem a little backward for a big feature of HTML5 to suddenly die, but hey, it's all a work in progress, and IndexedDB looks mighty fine.
- cageface 15y agoSQLite was the spec. Instead of extracting a spec from a working implementation of a bedrock internet technology they've gone old-school W3C blue-sky and designed a half-assed NoSQL spec instead. I've supported Mozilla in all their battles over patent-encumbered technologies in web specs but in this case they've fragmented the HTML5 spec for no good reason.
- iuguy 15y agoIt's interesting to see Amazon working around the iPad's artificial limitations in this way. jrockway's comment about the sqlite database is particularly interesting. I'm not convinced that it would be particularly feasible to implement DRM in a cross browser way without causing serious performance problems (although I await to be unpleasantly surprised).
- pogos 15y agoThis is so cool. I can now read kindle books on my ubuntu laptop without setting up kindle for pc + wine ugliness.
- RexRollman 15y agoAt least now I will be able to read Kindle books on my CR-48 (Chromebook).
- tord_f 15y agoShame that the dictionary is missing.
- redbrick 15y agoAnd, highlighting.
- jenquiqui 15y agoThat logo looks really ominous
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- cek 15y agoThere are rumors Amazon is bringing out a color Kindle that is more an iPad like tablet than a book reader, likely based on Android. Given the (apparently) great HTML5 work that went into building the Cloud Reader, I wonder what we'll see for UI in the color Kindle. Will there be a suite of apps that are all HTML5?
- toddmorey 15y agoWould anyone like to guess why search has been omitted in the web version? Also, for reference / technical books, it would be nice if the authors could mark certain blocks of content to allow copy and paste. It feels weird to have to retype all the code examples from a digital publication.
- stevelaz 15y agoWoot! Finally, we can now read kindle books on Linux. Thanks amazon.
- eneveu 15y agoI've just bought my first e-books with this week's Pragmatic Programmer 40% sale ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2861479 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2861479 ). I'm now interested in buying an e-reader. Still hesitating between Kindle, Nook, iPad, or an Android tablet... This might just tip the scale toward the Kindle DX.