Kindle for the PC, Beta

Amazon today announced the release of Kindle for PC, Beta. I downloaded it and installed it on my HP TouchSmart tx2 and it worked great (see picture left). Placing the tablet in portrait mode works the best for me - I'm not sure how enjoyable this will be on a traditional PC or notebook.

A lot of the features that are really interesting are not enabled yet - it is a beta after all - such as taking notes and highlighting. I'm really looking forward to those things being added.

The reader displays pages nicely although my TouchSmart screen is less than crystal clear - it's manufactured with a hazy display which is probably the results of the pen and touch input layers.

A couple things became very apparent when using Kindle for PC. ePaper with its crisp text display is really a must for long term reading. Besides the TouchSmart's inherently poor display I find reading on any standard monitor a bit tiring after a while. The ability to take notes, bookmark, and highlight are pretty much a must have. I read a lot of technical books (e.g. "HCI Beyond the GUI" pictured here) and having those note taking abilities is critical to my work. For reading novels, bookmarks will probably be enough.

Just for fun I took another photo, using my iPhone, of my HP TouchSmart tx2 running Kindle for PC sitting on top of my Microsoft Surface. A set up only a multi-touch nerd can really appreciate. ;-)