Amazon to Introduce Web Based Book Previews
It’s been a busy week for Amazon’s Kindle division: On Monday the company announced that it would start selling a new era of e-books that come embedded with audio and video. On Tuesday, Amazon also released a free Kindle application available for download on Google Android phones.
Send Sampleamazon.com Amazon currently sends book samples to select devices.
Continuing it’s e-books everywhere approach to digital reading, the company announced Wednesday in a blog post that it would soon offer a product called “Kindle Previewer for HTML 5? that will allow readers to view samples of books directly from within a Web browser.
In the past Amazon has required readers to send a sample section of a book to a device before it could be previewed.
The new service will show an e-book directly in the browser from a “Preview” button that will appear on a books Amazon Web page. When the button is clicked a window will open allowing customers to read the sample chapter of a book and then have the option to purchase the full book for a Kindle enabled device, including computer desktops, mobile phones and e-readers.
Amazon also plans to release the feature using HTML 5 and CSS3, the latest Web standards that are sometimes being used as an alternative to Adobe’s Flash for interactive online experiences. According to Amazon the pages will offer “complex layouts and graphic design, embedded audio and video where useful, and enhanced user interactivity.”
As I wrote on Tuesday, the announcements this week put Amazon ahead of it’s competitors who offer their digital book offerings on only varied devices and operating systems. The Kindle application, for example, is now available for the Apple iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone along with a number of computers and other mobile phones including Blackberry and Google Android. The iBookstore, in comparison, is only available on the Apple iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.
Amazon said the new preview feature will be available in the coming weeks.
Original Source: NY Times – Nick Hilton