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Amazon launched the Kindle App for iPhone yesterday night and it has set up a flurry of posts on Techmeme. I downloaded it yesterday night and played around with it. Now I am thinking whether it matters at all.

iPhone already has two good book reading applications in the name of eReader and Stanza. The early adopters of these two apps are already ridiculing the Kindle app. I thought I will offer my take on Amazon Kindle App for iPhone in this post.

• This app is short on features. You can’t search for books and you can’t buy the books from inside of this app, like how it can be done through the Kindle hardware. These are big put-offs for me
• When I checked last night and again this morning, I could not buy/subscribe to Newspapers and Magazines. This makes the app completely useless for casual users like me
• The books are stored in proprietary formats. When it comes to books, I want to keep them for a long time and being struck in proprietary formats may render them useless if the company behind the format vanishes in thin air
• In spite of the fact that there is no paper or printing involved and a much smaller cost on the supply chain and delivery options, the books are expensive in the ebook formats. In order to get the “Books on the Clouds” concept to gain traction, the pricing has to be attractive. If I can buy an used book for half the price of Kindle books in the same Amazon marketplace, why would I get attracted towards ebooks unless I feel deeply about the moral issues associated with the cutting of trees to make paper and global warming implications with the printing and delivery of these books
• The only advantage Kindle iPhone app has over eReader and Stanza is the huge number of titles available for Kindle compared to other formats

I love eBooks and it is my plan to move to eBooks from paper books as soon as possible. But the lack of availability of good eBook readers for Open Formats (sorry, I can’t read an entire book on iPhone) and exorbitant cost of eBooks are a big concern.