For any iPad owner who's seen those spiffy-looking magazines and newspapers on Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet and thought, "Hey, why don't my magazines and newspapers look this spiffy?", here's good news: Amazon just rolled out a Kindle app update that adds rich magazine and newspaper viewing to the iPad, among other things.
Kindle 2.9 for iOS offers several appreciable changes, and not just for the iPad. For example, iPhone and iPod Touch users will also notice a new scrolling menu atop their library; it lets you sort your view between books, magazines, and documents.
Also, you can now e-mail documents to your Send-to-Kindle address for quick and easy viewing on your iWhatever. (Those documents will also reside in Amazon's cloud so you can redownload them to other devices.)
In addition, Amazon has built in a PDF reader, which you can use not just for documents linked to your Kindle account, but also for PDFs that come from the Web, iTunes, and e-mail. The reader supports tables of contents and thumbnail navigation.
But it's definitely iPad users who clean up with this update. Like the Kindle Fire, the iPad can now tap more than 400 magazines and newspapers, all of them displayed in full color, just like the paper editions.
And good news for students: the new iPad app supports print-replica textbooks, which can be purchased or rented (at considerable savings). According to Amazon, "print replica textbooks maintain the rich formatting and layout of the print editions, with features including notes and highlights, zoom and pan, linked table of contents, and Whispersync of notes, highlights, and last page read."
Kindle 2.9 is available now. As always, it's free, though obviously most Kindle content is not.