It’s a happy day today for competition. Today, the largest e-book vendor on the market has announced that they’re going to be releasing an application for Mac OS X. Amazon has put together a free eBook reading application in a hope to directly compete with the iPad, and Apple’s iBookstore. No longer will you have to buy a Kindle 2 or a Kindle DX to gain access to their enormous catalog.
Pretty interesting stuff.
We’re not sure what kind of back-door agreement might be in place with Apple, or if there even is one, but Amazon’s being pretty vocal about getting a Kindle-like app on the iPad, much like they have already done with the iPhone. Hopefully they’re successful, and consumers will have the opportunity to choose whether they want to stick with the native iBook reader or use a third party reader.
What could set the iBookstore apart from the Amazon store on the iPad is the tight integration with iTunes. We’ve seen a lot of competitive ideals come to the iPhone, some of which are far greater applications than Apple’s natively bundled software options, but at the end of the day, people seem to migrate to iTunes for their purchases. The iTunes digital hub could be the one thing that makes the iPad such a success.
I’m sure the big wigs at Amazon realizes this, and I certainly hope that they knock it out of the park with their Kindle application. We need some real competition in this market. A well designed Kindle application could seriously put a stranglehold on the iBookstore, and with rumours that other companies, such as Barnes and Noble, thinking about putting together their own bookstores on the iPad, things are going to get plenty interesting after launch.
