Version 4.16 of Kindle for iOS released

[AnemicOak]

What's New in Version 4.16

Social Sharing: This feature makes it easier than ever to recommend a book to a friend or chat about a funny quote. Kindle book readers (or senders) can recommend the book or share a quote from the book with whomever they want - one friend, a group of friends, or more. Customers can choose from the apps they use every day to chat with friends like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, as well as email, texting, and more.

Parallel Downloads: This feature allows customers to download up to 3 books simultaneously. Previous versions of the iOS app only allowed customers to download one book at a time (i.e. additional downloads would be queued and downloaded one at a time). With the new update, customers will be happy to see that the kindle app will download up to 3 books in parallel.

Audible: Minor UX improvements to how the player is shown/hidden.

[johnnyb]

Really nothing special... Now the desktop version needs an overhaul...

[tomsem]

I appreciate the Sharing improvements. Before you could only share to FB, Goodreads, and Twitter. Now one can share directly to Evernote, OneNote, etc. directly, without copy/paste or some hack like clippings.io.

Features I'd like to see:
- inline footnotes
- iOS 9 Split Screen/Slide Over support
- basic keyboard navigation, at the very least, for turning pages without needing to touch the screen (Apple is selling keyboards for iPad Pro, so it behooves app developers to do something useful with them). For extra credit, add hotkeys for chapter navigation, bring up and dismiss TOC, Xray, Annotations, etc.

[johnnyb]

Originally Posted by tomsem

I appreciate the Sharing improvements. Before you could only share to FB, Goodreads, and Twitter. Now one can share directly to Evernote, OneNote, etc. directly, without copy/paste or some hack like clippings.io.

Hey that's true, good catch
Unfortunately it only works for Amazon-bought books not personal documents...

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by johnnyb

Hey that's true, good catch
Unfortunately it only works for Amazon-bought books not personal documents...

You still have copy/paste for those. At least Evernote and OneNote support Slide Out (on compatible devices) so it is relatively easy to paste into those without losing your context. And even without Slide Out (older iPads, iPhones), iOS9 still has the 'Return to' button to take you back if you have to switch to do the paste. Ugly, but it works.

You may know this, but if you upload ePub to Google Play Books and mark those up, it will automatically (with opt in) create a Google doc with your notes in them, just as it will with things you purchase from them. If only they had some sort of tagging or folders for the books.

Personally I could care less about 90% of the features that Amazon has added to the Kindle apps over the years. The only thing they are doing is adding bloat to what should have been an unbloated reading app. Instead of turning their app into bloatware like Adobe does, I wish they would simply give us some more usable formatting controls like margins of whatever size we choose, text weight adjustments that actually work, font sizing that is scalable, etc. It is a bleeping READING app not a SOCIAL MEDIA app. So why doesn't Amazon improve it to make READING more comfortable to our eyes and tastes?

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by jswinden

It is a bleeping READING app not a SOCIAL MEDIA app. So why doesn't Amazon improve it to make READING more comfortable to our eyes and tastes?

The apps are updated based on Amazon's priorities. You already bought the book. The social/sharing features are all about generating new sales to others.

[johnnyb]

Originally Posted by tomsem

You still have copy/paste for those. At least Evernote and OneNote support Slide Out (on compatible devices) so it is relatively easy to paste into those without losing your context. And even without Slide Out (older iPads, iPhones), iOS9 still has the 'Return to' button to take you back if you have to switch to do the paste. Ugly, but it works.

You may know this, but if you upload ePub to Google Play Books and mark those up, it will automatically (with opt in) create a Google doc with your notes in them, just as it will with things you purchase from them. If only they had some sort of tagging or folders for the books.

Personally, I mostly use iBooks now for books where I need the notes available on my computer... Really looking forward to the 9.3 update, and hope that Amazon will finally update their messy Mac app with actually useful features like support for Personal Documents!

[tomsem]

I would point out that the new Sharing features in all likelihood involved removing code, even as they expanded the available options to include 'anti-social' sharing, which is to say, sharing with oneself. This will be welcome to anyone doing academic work that involves reading something they happen to get from Amazon, or for taking notes for writing reviews, etc. I would not be complaining about it.

After suffering many years of exceptionally bad typography in the iOS app, I'm for the time being content with the improvements they have made over the past year or so. It's far more consistent and much better than it used to be.

I agree that it is baffling that Amazon's ideas about margins in particular have not advanced over the years, but compared to the reading apps of Amazon's competition (Apple, Google, Kobo, Nook) there is little to envy in terms of having better presentation options (Play Books perhaps being the one exception).

Kindle also has exemplary support for iOS Accessibility features, equaled only by iBooks, and pretty much ignored by the other competitors.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by johnnyb

Personally, I mostly use iBooks now for books where I need the notes available on my computer... Really looking forward to the 9.3 update, and hope that Amazon will finally update their messy Mac app with actually useful features like support for Personal Documents!

This is where I find something like Evernote of value: it doesn't matter where you read something of interest, and you have access to your notes anywhere as well.

Google might be a better host for 'personal documents'. Amazon has not improved anything about how they do that for a number of years now (apart from kf8 support), and that has set very low expectations that they will ever do so. You can add epub or PDF to your Play Books library, read and annotate with any desktop browser (mobile browsers, not so much), or with the iOS or Android apps. And they have that nifty feature to save your annotations to Google Docs, in an immediately usable and editable form. It's only problematic if you are using an Amazon device, or Windows Mobile or something like that.

What iOS 9.3 feature(s) are you looking forward to? the only one I'm at all interested in is Night Shift.

[johnnyb]

Originally Posted by tomsem

What iOS 9.3 feature(s) are you looking forward to? the only one I'm at all interested in is Night Shift.

Apart from Nightshift, Apple will apparently add proper iCloud support to iBooks which means that you can upload your books to iCloud and access them on any iOS device without iTunes-syncing... Essentially this is what Google Play and Amazon have been doing, only Apple has a really neat desktop reader in iBooks which is great for browsing notes etc

[tomsem]

Oh, okay. I still can't find any official information about this iCloud support in iOS 9.3. I'll keep asking (on the other thread). And while it is of philosophical interest to me, I doubt I'd have use for it myself.

Originally Posted by jhowell

The apps are updated based on Amazon's priorities. You already bought the book. The social/sharing features are all about generating new sales to others.

That is precisely my point. The social media features are for Amazon and not so much for us. Amazon wants to sell more of everything. They could care less about our reading experience. Before long we will likely have advertisement windows that pop up ever so often in the Kindle app while we are reading a book.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by jswinden

Before long we will likely have advertisement windows that pop up ever so often in the Kindle app while we are reading a book.

That would be too easy for us to work around. Instead they will have the reading software insert the ads into the text of the book you are reading.

The black-moustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. "This would be a great time to have a Pepsi!", he mused. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC.

[mattcurtis]

Originally Posted by jhowell

That would be too easy for us to work around. Instead they will have the reading software insert the ads into the text of the book you are reading.

Thanks for the laugh.

There's an advertisement agency out there right now working on this.