It has been a busy week for Amazon’s Kindle division: On Monday the company announced that it would start selling new e-books that come embedded with audio and video. On Tuesday, Amazon also released a free Kindle application available for download on Google Android phones.
Continuing its e-books everywhere approach to digital reading, the company announced on Wednesday in a blog post that it would soon offer a product called “Kindle Previewer for HTML 5″ that will allow readers to view samples of books directly from within a Web browser.
In the past Amazon has required readers to send a sample section of a book to a device before it could be previewed. The new service will show an e-book directly in the browser from a “Preview” button that will appear on a book’s Amazon Web page. When the button is clicked a window will open allowing customers to read the sample chapter of a book and then have the option to purchase the full book for a Kindle-enabled device, including computer desktops, mobile phones and e-readers.
Amazon also plans to release the feature using HTML 5 and CSS3, the latest Web standards that are sometimes being used as an alternative to Adobe’s Flash for interactive online experiences. According to Amazon, the pages will offer “complex layouts and graphic design, embedded audio and video where useful, and enhanced user interactivity.”
As I wrote on Tuesday, the announcements this week put Amazon ahead of its competitors. The Kindle application is now available for the Apple iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone along with a number of computers and other mobile phones, including Blackberry and Google Android models. The iBookstore, by comparison, is only available on the Apple iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Amazon said the new preview feature would be available in the coming weeks.
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