Amazon to offer web based reading too
Yesterday Google opened their ebookstore. When Google gets in your space, it is time to get defensive. Today Amazon demonstrated Kindle for the web which, as I understand it so far, will allow you to read your Kindle books from any web browser.
From what I have read so far, I am not really sure how either of these is supposed to work exactly. The point made in most of the articles I have read is it allows you to read books from any web browser. That sounds all well and good, but does this mean you have to have an active connection to the web to read your books? I don’t really like that idea. Also, I find it hard to believe that they will let you log in from any device with a web browser and read your books. Right now they don’t even let you give your book to a friend when you are done with it; the most you can hope for is to lend it to them for a short period of time and then you can only do it once. If you can read your books with any web browser, what is to stop you from giving your access information to all you friends so they can log into your account and read your books?
It would be great if it were true. You could read on your ebook reader when you are at home and pick right up with your smartphone, or whatever you have on you, when you are out and about. They are your books that you paid for, why shouldn’t you use them where you want. I wouldn’t even be totally objection to something like Netflix where you can read them on six devices registered to your account.
It will be interesting to see how they are planning on handling it. Competition is a good thing.