Amazon Updates Kindle for Android With Magazine Support

Amazon has updated its Kindle for Android app, adding support for newspapers and magazines. Amazon has long offered access to newspaper and magazine content via its Kindle hardware devices, but this is the first time that functionality has been extended to third-party gadgets.
Amazon originally announced its plans to bring periodicals to its iPhone, iPad and Android apps in October. Users can purchase single issues or subscription content for newspapers and magazines from within the Kindle for Android () app or from Amazon.com. Subscription content is auto-delivered and content is synced across devices and platforms.
Amazon competitor Kobo introduced periodical support for its iOS apps in October. The approach — as well as the available content — is similar on both services.
We signed up for a trial subscription to The Atlantic to test Kindle for Android’s new periodical support. Each article is accompanied by a small image, but this is still very much a text-based implementation. Still, the reading experience is surprisingly good. While lacking the multimedia enhancements of magazine apps for the iPhone or iPad, Amazon’s approach still offers good navigation and easy readability.
Newspapers and magazines support full text search (a nice touch) and selected text can be defined on the fly by Dictionary.com or looked up in Wikipedia (). You can also find other instances of a word or phrase within the publication.
Although this text-centric approach works quite well for smaller screens — like smartphones — we’re unsure how well the experience will translate to larger-screen Android tablets or on the iPad. For publications like The Economist, The Atlantic or The New York Times, the experience is quite serviceable.
For example, we downloaded an issue of a local magazine, The Atlantan, and found the experience to be less enjoyable. Text is still selectable and images can be zoomed in on, but the overall layout suffers from the same problems that many books with graphical layouts suffer when translated to ePub. Reformatting content for touchscreen devices is a non-trivial task, and as it stands, the Kindle implementations of periodical content can’t compete with the solutions offered by Adobe (), ScrollMotion or even PDF-based Zinio.
The key advantage of Amazon’s solution lies not in its implementation,
but with the buy once, read everywhere strategy, as well as its subscription pricing plans. Like Kobo, which offers similar functionality, this is a great value proposition for consumers who can be reassured that their purchased content is accessible across platforms and devices.
Apple is rumored to be close to launching its own subscription magazines solution. A consortium of major media publishers is also prepping Next Issue, which is self-dubbed “Hulu () for magazines.” It’s possible that Amazon could take a more tablet-centric approach for some of its content — much as Barnes & Noble is planning with the Nook. Were that to happen, Amazon’s offering could be much more attractive.
For now, we’re impressed with the Kindle of Android update, with the caveat that this is really suited for text-heavy publications.
Are you buying or subscribing to magazines or newspapers on your smartphone or e-reader? Let us know.