Amazon adds multimedia support to Kindle for Android and iOS

Amazon rolled out a big update for their Kindle app for Android and iOS, which now includes support for audio and video as well. Users can now view ebooks with embedded audio and video, thanks to the Kindle Format 8 support. This new format was previously only available exclusively to Kindle’s Fire tablet, which took advantage of the colour screen. Given the fact that a larger chunk of users use the app on other tablets, rather than the Fire, Amazon have decided to add support for the app as well. The format is based completely on HTML 5, which allows for rich multimedia content to be embedded in the ebooks. 

Just got better!

Just a week back, Amazon released an update for Kindle, in order to support the new Retina Display on the new iPad. The new update also brings with it some bug fixes and a new feature for the Android version of the app, called ‘Send to Kindle’. The latter allows users to send documents to a user defined e-mail address and have them synced to their Kindle account. Due to the addition of Format 8 support, this opens up a whole new category of ebooks that users can download on their phones and tablets, which was previously not possible. Supported formats, include Microsoft Word (doc, docx) , HTML, RTF, JPEG, Kindle Format (MOBI, AZW), GIF, PNG, BMP and PDF. The update gives users access to over 1,000 children’s books as well as comic books like Batman, Superman, etc. In order to offer a good value prospect for their Kindle Fire tablet, Amazon ported over 400 magazines and newspapers, back in November 2011 and the only way to get them was to get the Fire tablet. Amazon has now realized that creating a niche segment in a world dominated by iOS and Android devices won’t hold much longer and the only way to reach out to the masses was to support other devices as well, which is what they’ve now done.