Amazon introduced their Kindle book support for the iPhone / Touch today. Allowing you to purchase and read any of their 250,000 (currently) books originally created for their Kindle (2.0 introduced a few weeks ago) electronic ink book reader. There is of course pros and cons to that… if you are a serious book reader, you will enjoy the larger screen of the actual Kindle device. While the iPhone / Touch have smaller screens, causing the text to format poorly, you do have full color available where needed.

Amazon isn’t the first and only book reader for the iPhone, there are many available with a variety of features and ranging from Free to 14.95 for the reader only. Also, do not confuse book reader apps with document reader / manager applications.

I will hit on a few of the bigger names today (based on number or downloads and support). In no particular order, I will start with the Amazon Kindle iPhone app since it is most likely what brought you here today. When looking for this application in the iTunes App Store, you will find a lot of “Amazon” applications for searching and buying, you want the “Kindle” version which is their reader.

The Amazon Kindle app is among the simplest of interfaces in the group. It’s strengths are in what is going on behind the scenes, what Amazon calls “Whisper”. The book text presentation is full justification black text on white background, providing methods to see your progress, swipe your finger to change pages, slider to jump to another page and bookmarking. Whisper watches what page your on and tracks so if you have the book on other devices your ending spot will be remembered across all of them. Archiving is also supported with Amazon keeping track of your purchases so you do not loose your books if you remover them from your device. Finally is the ability to buy and load books, which Amazon makes as easy as possible. This interface is locked to only view Amazon distributed books. Purchasing books is done through Safari