Can Kindle App For Mac Do Audio Books Rating: 10,0/10 8297 reviews
Ever since the iBooks was announced, this is probably the single biggest issue an avid ebook reader will ultimately have to deal with: Kindle app or iBooks. What should you pick? Well, no one can tell you that for certain, but I hope to give you a little insight that might help you decide.
Software for small business management. The fundamental difference between the two is the Kindle app has a very large ebook selection by comparison. 750,000 ebooks on Kindle and 60,000 books at iBooks launch (Apple has not released exact numbers). To me, this is the differentiating factor. Both applications support landscape view with two columns and a built-in dictionary as well as syncing of bookmarks, highlights and notes. Let's look at some of the differences of each app beyond how many books they have.
May 01, 2013 Kindle will now read aloud over 1.8 million books, allowing those who are visually impaired to kick back and listen to their favorite titles. But that’s not all it’ll do for you.
(You can get our quick review of the Kindle app here and iBooks app here)
Read Kindle On Mac
Kindle
The Kindle app is a free universal app so you can run it on any iOS device. You can tap the left or right of the screen to turn pages and tap the top right corner to bookmark a page. You have several levels of font sizes and colors to choose from to help create your reading experience as good as it can be. You can even sync your annotations to other devices that support Kindle, that includes any iOS device, Mac, PC, Android and BlackBerry as well as Amazon's own Kindle.
There are a couple of innovative features that the Kindle has brought to the ebook table. First the Kindle app displays popular highlights in a book via underlined text while you read. You can easily see what other people have highlighted, quotes or whole passages. Second is data supplied by Shelfari. This content includes summary, character, spoilers and more; not a bad benefit. On the iPad, you can turn on a page turning feature similar to iBooks, but it is not has smooth or pays as much attention to detail as Apple's iBooks. On iPad, you have to different ways to view your library; big icons that can use pinch to zoom to resize as needed or an alphabetical list. I like both options depending on my mood, but what is lacking is a manual arrange function; You only can sort by Recent, Author or Title.
Since Kindle books are in the cloud, there is no need to sync your book on any desktop. Simple navigate to the archive in Kindle and redownload your book and it will then sync your bookmarks and other annotations.
iBooks
iBooks is a free download from the App Store for iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad. You can immediately tell the difference in aesthetic quality between the two apps. When reading with iBooks, it 'feels' like a book. In portrait iBook's pages look like they are laying on a bound book. When you turn a page, you can see the print on the other side. Also, one of my caveats with the Kindle app is resolved in iBooks; I can manually arrange my books in any order. One of the other benefits of iBooks is the very nice PDF reader that is built it. You can easily search within PDFs and bookmark pages. For later reference, you can even filter to just view pages you have bookmarked. This is a very nice feature to have for free.
These are all very nice touches iBooks. The look, feel and options are fantastic. However, content is king, just like available software for a platform and regretfully, iBooks falls flat on its face. 9 out of 10 books I search for on iBooks comes up empty. This is very disheartening. I remember in the early days of the Kindle, they only had a 100,000 ebooks or so and are now approaching one million. Sadly, iBooks is not even up to 100,00o yet. I have hopes that Apple will forge the relationships needed to foster a growing library.
Alas, at this time, Kindle really is the better choice for content and iBooks is a much better app. In the end, what s more important to you; books you can actually read, or a pretty application?
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Amazon Audio App For Kindle
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Kindle - is the best and most popular ereader in the world. However, organizing books on this device - leaves much to be desired. From the very first model, Amazon has decided not to support folder structure for electronic books. Or rather, you can create folders and put ebooks to them, but on the device screen books still will be displayed in a single list (with no folders). Instead of folders Kindle offers collections to organize books. Ok, in some cases it's even better, as one book can be included in several collections, such as 'What to read next' and 'Adventure Books'. Looks like everything is fine, but what happens in practice?
1. Kindle Collections
When you just bought your Kindle and have 1, 2, 3 .. 20 books - everything is fine. You create several collections, put books to them and your library looks nice. But as you get more books, create more collections, the beauty fades out. Because Kidle's e-Ink screen (even if it's touch screen) is very poorly suited for displaying and, especially, for organizing electronic library. First, it's black and white, so forget about color covers. Second, you can't drag-n-drop a book (and even more several books) to collection. You have to open each book and check boxes in order to select collections that you want this book to appear in. If you have a lot of books and collections - it's a nightmare.
2. Kindle Cloud Collections
Thankfully, Amazon has recently added the opportunity to organize collections in your online account. Cloud collections are synced with collections on your device. Looks like everything is OK now. But the cloud interface - is still awful. Checkboxes rule, no covers, no drag-n-drop. At least, you can use a mouse. But the major drawback is that in Kindle Cloud your own books are separated from books purchased from Amazon, so you won't be able to organize them to collections. And, probably, this situation won't change, because Amazon wants you to read only purchased books.
3. Desktop collection managers (don't work)
If you search on Google, you may find a couple of desktop programs, that are positioned as Kindle Collection Managers. And yes, once they really worked. You could create and edit collections on your computer and then sync them to Kindle. But then Amazon decided to end the party and closed the Kindle firmware from third-party applications. So all of these programs don't work now.
But what about Kindle Desktop? Of course, we forgot that Kindle has its own desktop client for Windows! It's beautiful and comfortable! And yes, it features collections! But what a Bummer! These collections are not synced with Kindle ereader or even with Kindle Cloud. And even if the miracle happens, and they will sync, still you won't be able to sync collections with your own books (not purchased from Amazon).
4. Desktop Book organizers
There are some good desktop ebook organizers that can work with Kindle. In particular - Calibre (Windows, Mac, Linux) and Alfa Ebooks Manager (Windows only). They work like this: you connect Kindle via USB and the book organizer scans your device and displays your library. They can't organize collections on Kindle (for the reason described above), so you still have chaos on the device. But you can organize your books by various parameters (genres, authors, tags, ..) in the virtual library on your computer. Moreover, these programs allow to move books between computer and device, open (not DRM protected) books in the desktop viewer.
But probably the best option is Kindlian. In the past it was one of the Kindle collection managers. But now when Amazon closed the Kindle firmware, the developers released Kindlian 4, which offers very elegant way to organize books and collections. The idea is that all books from Kindle are backed up to your computer and only these books that you read now - remain on the device. And if you have only few books on Kindle - you have no problem with their organization.
At the same time you can organize the backed up Kindle library on your computer. It is beautifully displayed and you can use familiar collections and mouse to drag-n-drop books. If you want to send a book from the desktop library to ereader - you connect it via USB and send. Additional bonuses are search, metadata editing, desktop e-reader, converter to MOBI.