Kindle for PC Ships

Kindle for PC Ships, Hints At Future Color Kindle | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

Gadget Lab Hardware News and Reviews
Kindle for PC Ships, Hints At Future Color Kindle

* By Charlie Sorrel Email Author
* November 10, 2009 |
* 7:05 am |
* Categories: Desktops
*

Kindle fans now have one more place they can read their e-books: A PC. Kindle for PC joins the equally well-named Kindle for iPhone and, er, Kindle for Kindle in the list of ways to read Amazon’s DRM’ed content. A Mac version is “coming soon”.

The application does pretty much what the iPhone version does: your place is synced with other devices by Whispersync, and there is support for your bookmarks and annotations. You can browse and buy from the Kindle Store, but you can’t access blogs, newspapers or magazines. This isn’t a problem, we guess, as you’re sat at a computer with a web browser anyway.

But the thing that intrigues us is the screenshot above (along with more on the Amazon site) which shows a book with color illustrations. This may mean a color Kindle is on its way, or that Amazon is simply future-proofing its Kindle books. Either way, since when did Kindle books start to get color pictures? It would seem rather bandwidth-unfriendly to a company that restricts international downloads to save on the wireless bills.

On the other hand, you can now buy and read Kindle books without buying a Kindle. Amazon must be expecting its brand-name to shift a lot of e-books direct to computers. Imagine, then, how it would answer the question “Why are the pictures on my $1000 computer in black and white?”

Product page [Amazon]

Kindle for PC Ships, Hints At Future Color Kindle | Gadget Lab | Wired.com