First the bad news: In multiple ways, Amazon.com’s new Kindle reader for the iPhone and iPhone Touch falls short of being the ultimate iPhone e-book application. It fails to replicate all the major features of  a $359 Kindle device. It’s on the rudimentary side in certain areas. I found one or two instances of issues that were either quirks or outright bugs. I’d love to see a book reader for iPhone that was as polished and functional in its own way as the phone’s iPod software–and this isn’t it.

Despite everything, it’s a delight to have Kindle on the iPhone. What makes Kindle Kindle isn’t software as much as it is content–240,000 books’ worth of it, by far the largest collection of e-books ever assembled. Getting access to those books on a phone is by far the biggest deal in content for Apple devices since Apple itself added moves and TV shows to the iTunes Store. And given that there are far more iPhones and iPod Touches on the planet than Kindle devices, this could be a bigger moment for electronic books than the introduction of the Kindle in 2007 was.

The basics of Kindle on the iPhone are pretty much what you’d expect: You read books a page at a time, flicking through them with your thumb. You read in a full-screen mode that maximizes real estate for words, but tapping the screen gives you a pop-up interface with tools for bookmarking, changing text size (there are five options), and the like. [UPDATE AFTER HAVING PLAYED WITH KINDLE FOR IPHONE A BIT MORE: Having to swipe your thumb to flip pages is kinda uncomfortable, and you do it a lot when reading--I wish that you could turn pages by simply t

apping.] And for the first time, Kindle books appear in real black text on a real white background rather than the Kindle device’s grayish E-ink display:

Kindle Without Interface

kindle-with-interface1

Typographically, iPhone Kindle “pages” have reasonably crisp type, but there’s no hyphenation, which occasionally leads to ungainly justification with way too much white space, as in the line “realistic-looking cloth rabbit” below:

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Kindle for iPhone: Disappointing. Yet Still Amazing. | Technologizer.