The Kindle app is an amazing tool for reading books on mobile and computer. It's available for all platforms Android, iOS, Windows and Mac. Have you wondered what the Kindle app offers as an ebook-reading program? What features does it have? Then this detailed review is for you! Hopefully it will let you know whether it's a good option for you for reading.
1. Kindle App for Android/iOS Review
The Kindle app for Android/iOS is the app for every reader, whether you're a book reader, magazine reader, or newspaper reader. It puts over millions of books at your fingertips. You can shop for books easily by visiting the Kindle Store right from your Kindle mobile app. The reading experience is excellent as you can customize your reading on the app, such as adjusting font type, screen brightness, page color and more.
Download Kindle App for Android Here Download Kindle App for iOS Here
Features
1. You can choose from millions of books in the store of the Kindle app.
2. You can easily shop for ebooks, including bestsellers, new releases, and exclusive titles that you won't find anywhere else.
3. The built-in dictionary, Google, and Wikipedia allow you to look up words and get more information while you're reading your ebooks.
4. You can bookmark places you want to revisit, and make highlights and take notes throughout your book.
5. You can sync the same book across devices through the feature of Whispersync and the app could sync your furthest page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights automatically.
6. Customizing your reading is so easy. You can choose your preferred font size, screen brightness, background color, and more for reading your books.
7. When you can’t read, you can switch to listening to the Audible book within the Kindle app.
8. Your reading progress is being tracked. You can see what percent of the book you've read, real page numbers and how much time you have left in the book.
Positive Reviews:
Its the perfect app for taking all your books on holiday, without going over weight in your suitcase (leaving room for the inevitable souvenirs). Easy to navigate, you can make the book print larger with ease for those with poorer eyesight, without having to search for your chosen book in large print, you can also change your background colour for those people who have difficulty reading on white backgrounds, you can choose sepia or black. All in all, its the perfect reading app.
Honestly, I bought the kindle itself for the comfort of reading on an anti-reflex screen and for the neverending battery, but if you take out these two advantages of having the physical kindle itself, the app is even better. It lets you take screenshots, make highlights, change the background color, have animations for page turning, see colored pictures, letters and covers and more... it's all I love in a kindle, but even better!
Brilliant app for book lovers! Can use it on the go so ideal for squeezing in a read. Some of my favourite features are the highlighting option, page memory and instantaneous download of ordered books.
Negative Reviews:
I used to love this app, but I have to keep uninstalling/reinstalling because I'm finding every so often my library disappears! I'm also finding that I keep losing the ability to see the menu where i could see how many chapters there were in the book along with the spiel about the book itself until I reinstall. Very frustrating for an app that I use almost every day!
The Kindle app keeps crashing. Every few minutes of reading it either has a pop-up showing that the app has stopped working, or it would just close itself. When I try to highlight a sentence, it will stop working for awhile, then a pop-up appears showing the app has stopped working.
The app leaves a lot to be desired: 1. Search is hard to do, there aren't enough filters for eBooks; 2. The ellipsis (three dots next to a book) don't work (leads to a blank screen); 3. There doesn't seem to be a way to do an 'advanced' search (by specific keyword (s), author, title only etc); 4. There isn't a way to filter out books that I've already read from search. I had the Kindle app several years ago and these were still issues earlier, surprising that they haven't yet been addressed.
2. Kindle App for PC/Mac Review
As Amazon's official reading app for Kindle books, Kindle for PC/Mac is a great ebook reader app for your computer, as it offers almost all the basic functions a desktop ebook reader should have. It can not only allow you to read Kindle books purchased from the Amazon store, but also upload your local PDF files. With the Kindle app for PC/Mac installed, you can get the best reading experience available on your computer.
Download Kindle App for PC/Mac Here
Features
1. A customizable reading experience with an abundant choice of fonts, font size, page width, line-spacing, text alignment and more.
2. So easy to add bookmarks, notes, and highlights.
3. Unique features like X-Ray, WhisperSync, Print Replica, flashcards and more.
4. The ability to export your notes.
5. Support for Text-to-Speech.
6. Comfortable reading experience with adjustable screen brightness and color mode.
7. Ability to add your local PDF files and DRM-free AZW3 or Mobi files.
8. Instant definitions, dictionary, Wikipedia and Search without leaving the page.
Positive Reviews:
So far so good. This app is a great tool for reading and being able to put it on a PC instead of on a phone alleviated the concern it would utilize too much bandwidth. This app makes the whole experience very convenient and keeps your place in the book along with other helpful features.. And with moderately sized books like Harry Potter, there is no need to hold the book in your hands unless you prefer a physical book. The choice is inevitably yours but it makes it a whole lot easier this way.Also; it’s saves on paper and ink saving a tree in the process.
Kindle for PC is an invaluable addition for the e-book user because it makes citing and quoting texts child's play. Highlighted passages made while reading the Kindle anywhere can be transferred, without the need for e-mailing and downloading, by simply cutting and pasting on the PC. It saves so much time, effort, and uncertainty that I now transfer PDF files to the Kindle because it saves so much work when referencing.
I love this app! I can be on one computer reading a book and then go to another computer and download the same app and immediately go to where I left off on the same book. Or if I need to go to another section of the same book to do more in depth research it does not affect where I left off on the book on my other computer. Highlighting certain sections is a breeze. It is easy to set fount size and page layout. I have found nothing that this app cannot do.
Negative Reviews:
As a owner of two Kindle Fires, this app makes me feel absolutely disrespected as a customer. It's obvious when Amazon doesn't care about a user base because they release apps like this. It's broken, it runs poorly, and it's lacking in features. Compare this app to what you'll find on iOS and there's a huge disparity. The Kindle for PC app is flat out atrocious. That's not a joke. It froze twice in a row just trying to load! I put the app in full screen mode, and guess what, there's no way to take it out of full screen mode!
This software is terrible, it doesn't have one of the most basic feature requirements which is to zoom in on the page like you can easily do with a PDF and then scroll up and down to read a page, books that have images or charts or symbols are unreadable, it locks the height of the page to the height of your screen which is not useful, although it has a option to increase the text size but this only works on literature books, not study text books. Don't bother buying any ebooks for studying if you hope to use this. Math's symbols don't display properly - they either have alignment issues or display invalid characters.
How on earth is this software so well rated? First of all, I can't find any way to download my entire library to my PC --- other than manually selecting each book and then choosing the Download option. I have a very large Kindle library, so this is a complete PITA. To make matters worse, if I try to download too many books at once (generally a bit more than 5 or so), the app crashes consistently! Finally, the majority of books in my Kindle collection are manga/comics, and each book takes a painfully long time to download, even though they are only a few hundred MB in size. Clearly Amazon's servers for Kindle eBooks are not very optimized for fast downloads.
Bonus Tip 1: Read Non-Amazon Books on Kindle App
Besides Amazon ebooks, you may have purchased some titles from other ebook stores such as Kobo, Google Play, Nook, or downloaded from online free ebook sites. You may like the Kindle app very much, but you fail to load those Non-Amazon ebooks to Kindle app as they are EPUB format which is incompatible with Kindle. The truth is that Kindle apps only support reading Kindle books and PDF files. To add your EPUB ebooks to the Kindle app successfully, you should first convert your EPUB ebook format to Kindle, or PDF format.
Here is the detailed guide: Convert EPUB to Kindle/PDF format .
After you convert your ebooks to Kindle or PDF format, you can follow the below guide to add your ebook to Kindle app.
Bonus Tip 2: Read Kindle Books With Non-Kindle App
You own lots of Kindle books, but are not satisfied with the reading experience with the Kindle app for PC/Mac/Android/iOS? Actually, there exists a quick solution for you - read Kindle books without the Kindle app. You may have heard that Amazon Kindle books can only be read on Kindle supported devices, like Kindle eReader or Kindle App. But it's not exactly correct.
Here is the detailed guide for you: Read Kindle Books with Non-Kindle App.
Suggested Reading
Michelle loves technology & reading very much. She seeks the methods to enjoy eBooks and audiobooks more freely and wants to share everything new she has got with you.
