Amazon updates its Kindle Mac app, adds support for gestures, new Kindle 8 format and more
Following the announcement of its new Kindle e-reader and tablet line-up at the end of last week, Amazon has pushed live a new update for its Kindle Mac app, adding support for Lion gestures …
Context & Ripple Effects
The update lands days after Amazon's September 2012 Santa Monica event, where it confirmed a full refresh of Kindle e-readers and tablets — including that every new Kindle Fire ships with Special Offers ads that cannot be opted out of. The Mac app gaining the Kindle 8 format is the desktop side of that same rollout: books bought for the new devices need a reader that can render them.
It also continues a pattern from the prior December, when Amazon updated the Kindle iOS app with a new iPad UI and Send-to-Kindle cloud storage — companion apps are refreshed in step with hardware rather than on their own schedule. The story travelled unusually wide for an app point release, picked up by PC Magazine, The Verge, CNET, Engadget and Mashable, reflecting interest in anything attached to the Fire launch cycle.
First-order effects
- Mac users who buy titles for the newly announced Kindle 8 devices can now read them on OS X Lion with native trackpad gestures, closing the gap between desktop and the new hardware at launch.
Second-order effects
- With ads non-removable on the new Fires, the software layer — synced apps on Mac, iOS and the tablet itself — becomes the differentiation battleground against Apple's iPad, which analysts at the time argued the Fire could not threaten until it expanded beyond its home market.
Third-order effects
- If each hardware generation keeps pulling its client apps forward, the Kindle cements itself as a cross-device reading service where the account, not any single screen, is what customers buy into — raising switching costs well beyond the price of an e-reader.
The trend: Amazon is running the Kindle as a device-agnostic reading platform, with desktop and mobile clients updated in lockstep behind each hardware refresh to keep the purchase inside its ecosystem.