Amazon Prepares a Kindle App for Cell Phones, Google Follows Suit

It looks as though there might be more forthcoming from Amazon's press event this Monday than just a Kindle 2 announcement, as we previously thought. Amazon has revealed a new project to make their ebooks (currently available to Kindle owners) available to everyone through their cell phones. Google has also made its library of ebooks available to any phone that has Web access.



Google has a significant stash of ebooks too, although all 1.5 million of them are older books that have expired copyrights. Nevertheless, if you want to read some classics on an iPhone or T-Mobile G1, it's now possible. One potential snag of the Google Book Search site is that you have to remain connected to the site in order to read books. The titles aren't actually downloaded to your device so they aren't available when you aren't connected.

The Kindle app from Amazon, on the other hand, appears to function just like the Kindle. In other words, you purchase one of the 230,000 Kindle ebooks and the ebook is downloaded to your device so it can be read even when you are offline.

This may sound like a silly move for Amazon to make just before announcing the next generation of the Kindle device. But it's actually more profitable for Amazon to sell book titles rather than the device itself, so making the ebooks available to more people through cell phones is a smart business model. In fact, we predicted a while back that cell phones would render the Kindle obsolete before long.

Obviously, if Amazon is releasing a Kindle 2 they must think that there is still some life in the ebook reader market. Indeed, there are probably a lot of people out there that would rather read an ebook on a Kindle than the small screen of a cell phone. But the Kindle app will be a great way to sell ebooks to the consumers that don't care about screen size. And more importantly, it might just be the kickstart that the ebook industry has been seeking for over a decade.

For more information, consult the review of the Amazon Kindle. For more tech news, try these other blog posts:

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