Comments Post by Zeke Koch, Director of Product Management, Digital Publishing
I’m delighted to see Amazon’s announcements today. One of the most fun (and occasionally frustrating) parts of my job is helping our publishers get their content on brand new devices. Over the last year, we’ve helped publishers get on Apple’s iPad as well as a host of other tablets, many that have launched and others that I still can’t talk about.
I think that I can safely say that this is the most excited that I’ve been about a tablet launch since the original iPad. You see, as an avid reader and frequent traveller, I’m a huge Amazon fan. I’ve bought over 400 books from Amazon over the last 15 years and while I’ve bought 88 ebooks for my various Kindles, I’ve been hoping that Amazon would support a dedicated reading device with a color screen and a powerful processor that would support high design digital magazines as well as web browsing and applications for great interactive experiences.
When Conde Nast approached me about helping them get on the Kindle Fire I was ecstatic. In order to show off Glamour, Wired and Vanity Fair the device would need a gorgeous display. A week later an unmarked box appeared in my office and as soon as I opened it, I knew that they had a winner.
Amazon has made a series of very smart choices. The device is small enough to hold comfortably in your hand for extended reading sessions. While it’s running Google’s Android operating system (which simplified our porting efforts) Amazon has streamlined and simplified the user interface to focus the user on reading. Next, they chose to use the Gingerbread version of Android which means that 100% of the screen is available to a publisher’s content. Finally, the $199 price point is astonishingly low.
We use Adobe AIR for our Android Content Viewer and that made it easy to customize it for Amazon’s device, as well as giving Kindle Fire customers access to their other favorite AIR applications. We added support for their Amazon Marketplace Payment APIs and the ability to hide and show their bottom navigation and Conde Nast were ready to go. We are adding support to Viewer Builder for the new Kindle Fire at the end of our next development cycle so that all of our publishers can start publishing their magazines on Amazon’s marketplace if they choose. And as Flash is also included, you can freely browse the web to access all of your favorite web sites.
This is such great news. I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these. And hopefully I’ll finally gets some downloads on my RunPee AIR app from the Amazon Marketplace.
Hi there, Great to hear the excitement! Thanks for checking out our blog.
Great! I’m so happy for this release, I hope this product comes to Mexico very soon!
I am glad to see Flash is available on Amazon Kindle Fire, unlike the iPads, I think Apple will change their mind about flash on iPad very soon
Awesome…congratulations to Amazon and Adobe
Nice!
Great, great news!!! The wait and all the struggles in learning this software is paying off ten times over. Thank you Zeke Koch and the brilliant Adobe DPS team!!!
Any photo of this?
Hi Tomasz, You can check this out: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0051VVOB2. Hope that helps!
But still no epub support? Is that true?
Hi Maureen, It does not, but you can download Android eBook Reader apps that allow you to read ePub books. Check out this article: http://www.newebookreader.com/kindle-fire-review. Hope that helps!
That is great news. Are you aware of any work arounds for getting magazine content onto the Fire before the Publishing Suite update happens? One of my favorite things about the Suite is that it makes handling the integration with the App store at Apple so seamless. I am hoping the same will go for Amazon.
Hey Nic, Thanks for your interest! We will handle it in a similar method as the Apple store integration. You will need to build an app specific to the Amazon app marketplace using viewer builder and submit it to Amazon for inclusion in their store. For each folio you will need to register an in app purchase with their marketplace and the buy button will be enabled in the app.
As a sophomore in college, I must say that the Fire sounds perfect! A Flash enabled, Conde Nast supported, small, and vibrant looking e-reader for only $200? I’ll take that over the iPad any day of the week. Can’t wait to see this hit the market next month!
All very well and good – BUT what about the concept of digital ink (grey) enabling reading in the sun: The problem with the Fire is that it reverts to being back lit and makes the screen unreadable outdoors does it not
CSR
Great news. Does that mean that any app developed with Air for mobile can be purchased for the Fire or are there restrictions?
Hey Breizo, Any app that you can submit to the Amazon Appstore will be available for the Fire (and for other Android devices).
Well I have he kindle fire but everything o try to download wont work does anyone have suggestions??
Hi Marie, Can you clarify what you are trying to download? It sounds like this might be a question for Amazon.