Amazon unveils Kindle for the Web

You can already read Kindle books on a whole host of devices besides the Kindle itself -- like your iPhone, Blackbery, Android device, PC, or Mac -- but Amazon's not stopping there. The mammoth ebook seller has unveiled Kindle for the web, an embeddable reader which is capable of displaying book samples right in your browser. In my testing, however, I didn't have much luck -- I tried to embed every "Look Inside" book by George Carlin after the break, but wound up having to use Amazon's example instead.

As Mobiputing's Brad Linder pointed out to me, this could eventually lead to an Amazon Video On Demand-type setup for Kindle: "stream" books to your browser via the viewer, or cache them via HTML5's localstorage element for offline reading. Hey, the Web is the platform, right? Why bother developing dedicated apps for a slew of different devices if you can cleverly code a single Web app which does the job just as well?

Take a look at the embed code in action after the break -- it's a lot like a Google Docs Viewer or Scribd embed. Kindle for the Web currently bears the beta tag, so you might not see it on many Kindle books as you browser Amazon's shelves.

Tags: amazon, ebook, kindle