Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Interactivity - New Possibilities with Amazon Technology

Here are the top 3 recent Amazon technologies I am excited about: Kindle Fire, Kindle Format 8 and Kindle Cloud Reader. 

1. Kindle Fire
Amazon's foray into the tablet computing space begins with Kindle Fire. Built on Android operating system, this tablet sports a touch-screen,  provides cloud storage and gives access to thousands of movies, shows, songs, books, apps, games and more. Its Silk Browser is ultra fast because it is cloud-accelerated. It uses a split browser architecture that is smart enough to decide a caching strategy based on network conditions, page loading time, already cached content etc.

2. Kindle Format 8 (KF8) 
KF8 is Amazon’s next generation file format supported by Kindle Fire. KF8 offers new features and enhancements – including HTML5 and CSS3 support that publishers can use to create all types of books. According to Amazon, KF8 adds over 150 new formatting capabilities, including drop caps, numbered lists, fixed layouts, nested tables, callouts, sidebars and Scalable Vector Graphics - opening up more opportunities to create Kindle books that readers will love.   Kindle provides tools to convert from traditional formats such as HTML, XHTML and EPUB. Kindle Direct Publishing service also lets authors publish in KF8 format.

3. Kindle Cloud Reader
This software app allows you to buy once and read everywhere. The Reader works not only on all Kindle devices, but also iPads and PCs.Users get a seamless experience as they switch from one device to another. In addition, with Kindle Cloud Reader, people can continue reading books using their web browsers whether online or offline.

Together these three technologies provide a promising platform for creating interactive reading experiences. The Kindle Fire brings together the power of the cloud and the promise of a tablet interface. KF8 paves a way for building moderately interactive content and publishing it using Amazon-provided tools. Finally, the Kindle Cloud Reader creats a standard and seamless reading experience across a wide array of devices.