Kindle for iPhone won't make you a reader

Amazon's Kindle on iPhone does not advance the reading experience on Apple's popular device at all. In that regard, it's rather disappointing and not just to me. After more than a week re-reading the brilliant Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, I had hoped it would make reading e-books on the iPhone somewhat pleasant. It didn't.

Downloading Kindle for iPhone from the AppStore is a cinch like always. However, getting the e-books downloaded departs from the, dare I say?, "traditional" way to get content for the iPhone. If you tap the "Get Books" button on the app you're instructed to use your PC or Mac to visit the Kindle Store.

The other alternative is to use Safari on the iPhone and attempt to order directly to your handheld. Fat chance. Or maybe it's my fat fingers that made that effort 15 minutes of frustration. In any case, using Safari on the iPhone to get books is a bust.

Once you've registered with Amazon, books are simple to buy. You click on the purchase button for any Kindle content and it streams directly to your iPhone and gets added to your Kindle for iPhone Home page.

Tap on any title and it opens to where you were last reading. To turn a page you slide your finger across the screen right to left or vice versa.

For me, though another AppStore book app, Classics--As Seen on TV by Andrew Kaz and Phill Ryu, makes the reading experience much more enjoyable. With it, you actually get a sense of turning a page and the graphical look of both the typefaces and individual pages is superior.

Books in the Kindle for iPhone app look like they just spun off an old laserwriter using troff and -lpr commands. And the best Kindle features, such as tapping on a word and getting a dictionary definition, are not available in this release.

A big plus for the Kindle for iPhone is that it lets you adjust the type size with a couple easy taps on the screen. Other iPhone book apps I've used don't permit it or force you to change the font in the Settings folder, a dumb method.

I've been trying to take up reading on my iPhone, but find it is a poor substitute for real books or the larger screen of a personal computer. And, while I like the idea of an e-book reader like Kindle, I find the prices they command only right for people with more money in their budgets than brains in their heads.