As much as I love the feel of holding a good book in my hand, there are a few things you can do with digital books that you can’t easily do with the old fashioned paper type of book. For instance, you can quickly search for text in the eBook, or highlight a word to look up its meaning in a dictionary. You know, assuming your eBook software lets you do that — which the Amazon Kindle app for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad now does.

Here’s how it works, just fire up Amazon Kindle 2.2 on your iDevice and open a book. then press and hold any word, and a menu will pop up asking if you want to add a note or highlight the text. You should also see a definition of the word from the Oxford American Dictionary.

You can also click the Google or Wikipedia buttons to search for the word on one of those sites using the web browser. Or you can click the Full Definition button to see a more complete entry for the word from the Oxford dictionary, which has about 250,000 entries.

When you install the Kindle 2.2 app, it will automatically download the dictionary, which you can also open as a standalone eBook if you’re the sort of person who likes to read through dictionaries cover to cover in your free time.

The new app also adds the ability for searching inside of books on the iPad.

The Amazon Kindle app for iOS is available as a free download from the App Store.

Amazon launched a new Kindle app for Android devices today. Like the company’s iPhone app, the new Kindle for Android app will let you find, purchase, download, and read digital books on your mobile device.

The mobile app synchronizes your last read pages, bookmarks, and annotations with other devices linked to your account. So if you have a physical Kindle eBook reader, an iPod touch or iPad with the Kindle app, and an Android phone, you can start reading a book on one device, put it down and pick up reading where you left off on another.

Kindle for Android lets you read in portrait or landscape mode, adjust text size,and background color. You can also search Amazon’e library of more than 600,000 free and paid books. You can also read the beginning of a book before making a purchase.

Newspapers, magazines and blogs are not available on the Android app, and you’ll need Android 1.6 or newer to use the app. While Kindle for Android is available in a number of countries, the book selection will vary by region. And it doesn’t look like the new audio and video capabilities that Amazon added to the iOS app today are available in the Android version.

With the launch of an Android app, Amazon now joins Kobo as one of the few companies with a decent cross-platform eBook reader that works on both iOS and Android and which offers a decent selection of book titles.

Purchasing books is easy if you already have an Amazon account — and you can even choose to purchase a title using the Android app and have it sent to another device linked to your account. When I logged in, I saw that I was able to download books to my iPod or PC, both of which also have Kindle software installed.

Amazon has rolled out an updated version of the Kindle software for Apple’s mobile devices. The new app adds support for eBooks with audio and video content. This opens up the doors to all sorts of multimedia content.

For instance, the latest Kindle edition of Knitting for Dummies comes with 6 videos that can actually demonstrate how to perform different knitting techniques. And the new version of Rick Steves’: London 2010 includes 5 audio tours that you can use while navigating historic landmarks in the city.

Right now there are only about a dozen titles with audio and video features. But I suspect that list to grow pretty quickly — especially if Amazon makes the audio and video features available on other versions of the Kindle eBook reader. Right now the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch are the only devices that support all the new features. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see multimedia capabilities show up in the upcoming Android app. And then there are the Mac, PC, and BlackBerry versions of the Kindle eBook reader. As my buddy Dave Zatz suggests, maybe we’ll see a multimedia version of Amazon’s physical Kindle eBook reader soon as well.

It’s also worth noting that the multimedia titles take up much more disk space than text-only documents. This means you can only download them over WiFi, not 3G. And it also means that if Amazon does release a new Kindle device with multimedia support, it may include more storage space than current models.

The new Kindle app is available as a free download from the App Store.

Amazon released a minor update to its Kindle app for iOS this week. Kindle 2.1 features a few tweaks that are aimed at iPad users, and one major new feature for iPhone/iPod touch users.

The iPad version gets bigger fonts and more font sizes as well as faster navigation between home and archived items.

The iPhone and iPod touch version now allows you to search for any term inside a book. If you ask me, the ability to search is one of the things that really gives eBooks a leg up on physical books, so it’s nice to see this feature making its way to the iPhone version of the Kindle App.

Amazon is also promising a few nifty features to look forward to in the next release, including search-in-book functionality on the iPad, Google and Wikipedia word lookup, and instant word-lookup in a dictionary with 250,000 entries.

The Amazon Kindle app for iOS is available as a free download from the App Store.

We already knew Amazon was working on a version of its Kindle eBook reader for Google Android. Now we know when it will be released… roughly. Amazon has announced that the Kindle App for Android is due out this summer — and it will have one major feature that’s missing from the iPhone and iPad versions. You’ll be able to purchase eBooks from within the Kindle app.

While the Amazon Kindle app for the iPhone lets you browse Amazon’s collection of digital books, when you actually want to purchase one, you’re taken to the Amazon web site in your web browser.  The Kindle Store for Android will offer a much more seamless experience. Want to buy a new book and read it? Just fire up one app, find the book you’re looking for, purchase and download it, and start reading right away.

The Kindle app for Android will let you synchronize your last page read and annotations with other Kindle devices. So if you’re reading the same book on a Kindle eBook reader, an iPod touch, a PC with Amazon’s Kindle software, or your Android phone, you’ll be able to pick up where you left off — which is a pretty useful feature.

Amazon says you’ll be able to read in portrait or landscape mode, and turn pages by flicking your finger or tapping on the side of the screen. You’ll also be able to create bookmarks, adjust text size, and tweak other settings.

The Kindle app will be free, although many of the books will cost money to download.

The app will require a device with Android 1.6 or later.

via TechCrunch

Amazon’s Kindle platform lets you purchase and read eBooks on an iPhone, BlackBerry, PC, or a Kindle eBook reader. So far there’s no app for Android. But as Kevin Tofel points out, it looks like a Kindle reader for Android could be coming soon.

The folks at Engadget got their hands on a couple of leaked documents from Dell for the company’s upcoming Dell Mini 5 tablet. The Mini 5 will be a 5 inch device with an 800 x 480 pixel display, an ARM-based processor, and Google Android. And if the slides obtained by Engadget are anything to go by, it will feature a suite of applications from Amazon including Amazon MP3, Amazon video on demand, and a Kindle eBook reader.

There’s already an excellent Amazon MP3 app for Android that lets you find, purchase, and download music. The Kindle and video on demand apps would be new. I suspect the Kindle app would look a lot like the iPhone app, which is to say it will be an excellent way to access the hundreds of thousands of eBooks Amazon offers, if not necessarily the best app for reading books if you care about things like changing the background color or dimming the display.

The video on demand feature could also be an awesome addition to the Android ecosystem. Right now you can watch YouTube videos on Android devices, but that’s about it for online video. Adobe Flash Player 10.1 for Android is in the works, so it’s possible that the Amazon video app will basically rely on Flash — the same technology it uses to stream video to desktop computers. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon develops a tool that lets you stream video without using Flash — much the way you can with YouTube videos currently. Odds are this would use fewer system resources.

It’s not clear if and when these apps will be available for Android devices that aren’t the Dell Mini 5. But