(Updated) Amazon Releases Browser-Based Kindle Cloud Reader

Update: if you choose to make an icon of the app on your home screen (it can be moved to a folder of course), when clicked, it behaves just like any other iPad app! There is no evidence that it's using the Safari web engine (which all apps have access to), and the browser menu bars are gone. This is pretty amazing, it's a perfect solution to companies who want to sell content through their app without paying the 30% commission to Apple. I don't know if it can work for games and such, but for ebooks and magazines I don't see why anybody would not do this, if they can get the web app made (I don't know how tough or expensive that is). The only hitch of course is that you have to find your own customers! If you don't have a lot of those, perhaps Apple's commission is worth it, after all 70% of something is better than 100% of nothing. This will be especially relevant after iOS 5 is released (early in September they say), with the new magazine/paper shop.

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Amazon Releases Browser-Based Kindle Cloud Reader, post.

It's not only a pretty good idea in general, it's also a finger raised to Apple: "See this? We can have an app with a built-in store, and your rules don't apply, because it's in a web browser. Hee-hee, yaw mama!"

It's worth noting that the 30%-to-Apple rule was there from the start, and web apps were Apple's original vision for iPhone apps, indeed they had to be pushed quite hard to allow anybody to build native apps. Here's an interesting commentary on that.

I still think that everybody would swallow the lemonade a lot easier if Apple had kept the commission on sales via iOS apps to 15% instead of 30. Thirty percent just seems greedy, and unless you have an exceptional profit margin, it makes it hardly worth it to sell anything via iOS.

Cloudreader on Safari on Mac. It's just the same on the iPad, good programming. 

I guess my one complaint about the app is, still and again, that the steps between the choices of text sizes are much, much too crude. Just six steps between incredibly tiny and read-across-the-room huge.  In my view, there should be at least twice as many steps, or better yet, just stepless. This is true for many apps, including iBooks. I really don't get it, do they think that the readers are so stupid that more than a handful of text sizes to choose from will confuse them? It's weird.

(This is the sepia background, and the middle text size.)