Downloader: Amazon's Kindle for Mac arrives, but it's not pretty

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Amazon's Kindle for Mac arrives, but it's not pretty

Amazon hasn't really made a big deal out of its Kindle for Mac launch today, but rest assured that you can download the app today and start reading your eBooks. The featureset is basically identical to the other apps in the Kindle family -- it's got Whispersync and page bookmarking, for example -- but Kindle for Mac is kind of the ugly duckling of the bunch.

There was a lot of potential to create an amazing reading experience on the Mac, but what you get is just tossed off. Like the PC version, Kindle for Mac works, and it's readable, but it basically does the bare minimum. You'd hope that a Mac app would at least use the Mac's native font-smoothing, but, as John Gruber points out, the type is sloppily rendered and the text isn't selectable.

I'm not going to complain too much about an app that works, provides access to my Kindle library on yet another one of the devices I own, but come on, Amazon. I'm a snobby Mac user, and I expect better.