Amazon Kindle To Get Apps and EA Games

Lanxon writes "Amazon currently encourages publishers and authors to sell their books and magazines digitally, but the upcoming Kindle Development Kit (KDK), which goes into beta next month, says Wired, will allow software developers to create a variety of different applications. Amazon has already confirmed a Zagat guide for restaurant reviews from Hallmark and a selection of word games and puzzles, such as Sudoku, from Sonic Boom. EA Mobile is also set to release games on the Kindle."The kit itself is expected to be available next month.

No "generic readers"?

[argent]

Voice over IP functionality, advertising, offensive materials, collection of customer information without express customer knowledge and consent, or usage of the Amazon or Kindle brand in any way are not allowed. In addition, active content must meet all Amazon technical requirements, not be a generic reader, and not contain malicious code.

So if you want to add support for a file format the Kindle doesn't currently support you're out of luck?

Wait, what?

[Drethon]

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the kindle (and E Ink in general) most efficient as displaying the same thing? Why would I want something with a frame rate killing my kindle battery?

Just my bent $0.02

Re:games?

[happy_place]

I'm hoping the first game is entitled "DRM Busters".

Re:Text adventures

[argent]

Would a Z-code interpreter count as a "generic reader" do you suppose?

Re:Convergence

[XxtraLarGe]

Just wait until January 27th [washingtonpost.com]. I hope you have about $1000 to drop. Or you could just get an iPhone now.

With Kindle you can read Txt files - Nook -Epubs

[gadlaw]

Having both platforms I 'get around' the buy only from Amazon for the Kindle and only buy from Barnes and Noble for the Nook by the fact that the Kindle reads and displays Txt files, reading some Larry Niven right now for the tenth time on my Kindle via a txt file book. (gotta love the Moties books). I can open up the Calibre software and change txt files to epub files that work on the Nook or visa versa. It's all good, neither one is actually locked down when you have Calibre.

Re:EA games on the Kindle?

[clickclickdrone]

Madden would be ideal - no action for a few mins then it all happens real fast then nothing again for a bit. Just get the user to enter the moves/plan, show the end result every couple of minutes, jobs done.

Re:One step closer to jailbreak

[Ephemeriis]

Hopefully it will be the Nooks & Sonys and whatever else which bury the Kindle, or at least see Amazon open up the device. Proprietary as most other devices are in some respect, it seems that they have rallied around EPUB + optional Adobe DRM. If DRM has to exist at least it should be device and vendor neutral.

My nook can certainly handle EPUB stuff just fine... And Barnes & Noble claims they're going to move their entire library over to EPUB eventually... But I don't know how open and friendly the Barnes & Noble store actually is. EPUB lets you embed whatever DRM you might want. I don't know that a B&N DRMed EPUB would actually work on anything besides a nook.

The fly in the ointment is Apple and what they intend to do. They're not exactly known for embracing standards except as a bait and switch for their own proprietary ones, so they may well support EPUB, but not the DRM everyone else is gravitating around. After all, that would let their users buy their books from anywhere and Apple simply can't allow that.

Apple has enough market penetration that they might just be able to force a kind of "lowest common denominator" as standard... Like it did with MP3s.

Everyone was playing around with their own weird DRM and file formats and everything... And then iTunes came along. And while Apple does do their own DRM thing, and their own file format, it's very easy to convert them to MP3. And everyone else got scared. You couldn't very well release your songs in a format that wouldn't work with iTunes and iPods, because they were everywhere. So you either dumped your stuff into iTunes, or you released it in some way that converted to MP3 without too much trouble.

Simple apps, but this could be good.

[bhartman34]

I see EA Games maybe releasing Scrabble, but I think the big draw for the development kit will be things like notes applications, calendars, and the like. Hopefully a decent e-mail client, too (although I wonder how much they'll allow with the Internet connection, since they're currently footing the bill for Internet charges on the cell radio).

I Don't Believe It

[ideonexus]

Let me get this straight. My Kindle doesn't have the functionality to store my library in categories, meaning I have to hack in metatags on all my ebooks using the note-taking feature and search that if I wan't find just my books on Computer Science or Science Fiction, the recent upgrade to my Kindle allows me to view PDF files, but not zoom in on their page content, meaning I still can't read PDF's on it unless I pack a magnifying glass, and I have no way of exporting the personal notes I take on it to a text file or other non-kindle-readable format.

I don't mind these shortcomings, because the whole point of my Kindle is not having to reading books on my cellphone or computer monitor, but now I'm supposed to believe I will soon be getting games on this device currently lacking so many basic features? I'm not drinking this kool aide.