![]() But it’s not as responsive or smooth as the native app.Īnd here’s the best part: Once you decide you want to buy a book, you tap the Buy button. If I didn’t have the native iPad app to compare it to, I’d declare it good. In general, the web app reading experience is pretty good. It appears that the tool is doing some very clever things with caching and rendering portions of a book, perhaps one chapter at a time. I noticed some lag and delays in the Cloud Reader app as I used it, especially when moving from chapter to chapter. The Cloud Reader doesn’t support this feature, though its toolbar features a button that lets you view any notes and marks you made elsewhere. You can even opt to see passages that were highlighted by other readers. The web app offers no such animation-the new page just appears.Īmazon allows Kindle users (in both its iOS apps and on its dedicated Kindle devices) to highlight passages in books and make notes about the text. The only difference is in what happens as you make those gestures: the iPad app shows an animation of one page sliding away and another sliding in (and in fact, moves the pages right under your fingers if you choose to swipe from one page to the next). The same gestures work on the Cloud Reader web app. In the native iPad app, you can tap or swipe to change pages. The native app can show book text in two separate columns when you rotate the iPad into landscape mode the Cloud Reader will only show you a single, wider column. One book I tested, Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker, appeared justified in the native app and ragged-right in the web app, which I really can’t explain. (Both apps let you choose from black, white, and sepia color schemes.) Most of the books I read in the native Kindle app feature justified text, but some of the books in the Cloud Reader app appear to display with a ragged right margin. The text options are more limited in the Cloud Reader app: you can choose from five text sizes, while the iPad app gives you six to choose from. The reading interface in the native app (left) and the web app (right). The web app displays most of its menu options via a toolbar that drops down over the top of the page, while the options on the iPad app fade in seamlessly over blank space. The web app displays the black bar at the top of the iPad’s screen at all times, showing you the time, your battery status, and wireless connectivity, while the native app only displays that information when you tap to reveal the various page controls. In both interfaces, you can tap on the screen in order to toggle the display of various reading controls, including text settings, a link to the book’s table of contents, and a slider that lets you jump anywhere in the book. The reading experience in the two apps is quite similar, but here there are some notable differences, too. To see all books that have been downloaded, you tap on the Downloaded tab at the bottom of the screen. To store a book locally on your device in the Cloud Reader, you must tap and hold on its cover, then tap “Download & Pin Book” from the resulting pop-up menu. To read a book in the Cloud Reader, just tap on its cover art while tapping in the Kindle app will download the entire book to your device, the Cloud Reader web app will start loading the book over the Web and display it right away. ![]() (It’ll even show up in your list of running apps when you double-tap the home button.) Unfortunately, you’ll need to log in to again and authorize the offline data storage a second time. Tap on it, and Kindle Cloud Reader will load again-this time without any web-browser interface trappings. This will create a new Cloud Reader icon on your iPad’s home screen, complete with custom icon. Amazon will ask you to log in with your user name and password, and then you’ll be prompted to authorize an increase to the amount of data Amazon can store on your iPad-essentially carving out 50MB of space to download books for offline reading.Īt this point, the best thing to do-and I’m surprised Amazon doesn’t actually step you through the process-is tap the Share icon in Safari’s toolbar and choose Add to Home Screen. Adding the Kindle Cloud Reader is a bit more complicated.įirst, you have to open Safari and visit. ![]() One of the advantages native apps have is that they’re easy to find: Launch the App Store app, type Kindle, and in a few seconds you’ve downloaded and installed the Kindle app on your iPad’s home screen. With the release of the Kindle Cloud Reader, Amazon is now doing both. As Steve Jobs himself has said on many occasions, Apple offers two pathways for developers to put content on the iOS-via the curated App Store experience and via the completely open world of HTML5-based web apps.
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