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Amazon added a few bricks to its Kindle kingdom on March 18, with the introduction of Kindle for Mac, a free application that lets readers pull up Kindle books on a Mac computer.
“Kindle for Mac is the prefect companion application for customers who own a Kindle or Kindle DX,” Jay Marine, director of Amazon Kindle, said in a statement. “For those customers around the world who don’t yet have a Kindle, Kindle for Mac is a great way to instantly access and read the most popular new releases as well as their old favorites.”
The U.S. Kindle Store includes more than 450,000 titles, including nearly every book on the New York Times Best Seller list.
Amazon’s Whispersync technology in Kindle for Mac can save and synchronize bookmarks and the last page read, so that a user can, for example, pick up on her laptop where she left off on her Kindle.
Kindle books can be read on the Kindle, Kindle DX, iPhone, iPod touch, BlackBerry handsets, PCs and Macs. A Kindle app for the Apple iPad is also coming soon-though it’s thought that the iPad, in the long run, could offer the market-share-hording Kindle some competition.
Amazon says that it will soon add features to Kindle for Mac that include the ability to perform a full-text search, to highlight text and create and edit notes.
For the time being, however, features include access to a user’s previously purchased Kindle books, which are stored on Amazon servers; a choice of 10 font sizes and the ability to adjust the number of words per line; the ability to view notes made or text highlighted with a Kindle, Kindle DX or iPhone; and the ability to read books in full color, which can be particularly handy for children’s books, cookbooks and travel books.
The Kindle for Mac app is currently available at www.amazon.com/kindleformac.