The Amazon Kindle app for Android has just received an update and it’s full of cool new features like voice search and Wikipedia integration.
The Amazon Kindle app for Android now includes:
– Search within the book: Customers can either type or speak a word or phrase to search within a book.
– Add, Edit and Delete Notes and Highlights: Kindle for Android is the only reading app for Android-based devices that allows readers to add notes and highlights to books, and have them automatically synchronized between devices.
– Wikipedia Lookup: Look up words and phrases in Wikipedia simply by selecting text.
– Shelfari Book Details: For the first time, customers can view additional book details from the books-focused social networking site Shelfari. Readers will find a description of the book, synopsis, summary, cast of characters, and many more features, and be able to view real-time discussions that the Shelfari community is having about the book.
– Orientation Lock: Choose to lock the orientation of their screen in landscape or portrait mode to allow for comfortable reading in any position.
This comes on top of what you already expect from the Amazon Kindle app for Android, which includes more than 70,000 e-books and the ability to sync your reading across devices.
The move comes as the competition in the e-reader space is heating up, as Apple is trying to position the iPad as an e-reader with its iBooks platform for the iOS devices. Apple has convergence in its favor, as its tablet can do much more than simply reading books.
I love Amazon’s strategy though, as it has lowered the price of its Kindle hardware and is poking Apple with this in commercials. Additionally, there are Amazon Kindle apps for a wide variety of platforms, so the online giant can still sell its digital books no matter which device you own.