Archive: August 11, 2011

<<< August 10, 2011

Home

August 15, 2011 >>>


cloud Kindle

Thursday,  08/11/11  07:44 PM

Amazon have released a new Kindle reader ... for the cloud.  Written to use HTML5, it provides a complete Kindle reader application entirely in a browser, supporting Chrome, Safari, and [of course] IOS' Safari.  (Not Firefox yet - HTML5 incompatibility?)  Presumably it supports the Android's browser too; not sure.  The experience is amazing because it's exactly what you expect:

But there are some interesting wrinkles.  First, because it's a web app, it can be updated infinitely without your involvement.  As of 8/11/11, it doesn't support highlighting, but if Amazon adds that tomorrow, we'll all have that capability without doing anything.  Second, it has *all* of your books available, all the time.  There's no interplay between "books on the device" and "books in the archive"; they're one and the same.  And third, you get the same user experience on every device; some would argue that's not a plus, but to me - someone with a PC laptop, four Macs, an iPad, a Palm Pre, a Motorola Droid, and an iPhone - it's a big plus.

Most cool of all; it can store books offline.  I'm not sure how this works - have to dig into this further - but if you're reading a book and you get on an airplane, lose your cell signal, or otherwise go offline, you can keep reading.  That's a pretty interesting feature for a web app, and one we may see replicated on other sites soon.

BTW a common online take is that this is Amazon's response to the new Apple App rules, wherein an App cannot link to a website (and hence, Kindle readers cannot just click over to the Amazon store).  I think that's a pleasant coincidence, and Amazon have been working on this capability for a long time.  I suspect they want to get out of a world where they have a separate client App for every platform.

 

world population map

Thursday,  08/11/11  11:14 PM

As part of their "global 500" report Fortune magazine published this excellent map of the world, with the size of each country proportional to its population:


world by population (click to enbiggen)

I love this map; it shows just how small the U.S. is compared to the world (that's us in green rectangle at the upper left), and the comparatively huge populations of China and India, and the basically equal sizes of Brazil, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Indonesia.  You read these numbers but nothing like a diagram to bring them home.  I will refer to this often.

 
 

Return to the archive.