Once upon a time, it was possible to purchase content on an iPhone directly from Amazon's Kindle app. If you saw a book you wanted to read, you bought it without ever leaving the app. Boom, done.
But Apple got a little grabby with the fees they demanded off the top of each purchase made through iPhone apps. It was enough to drive Amazon—another money-grubbing engine of crawling capitalist death—away from allowing in-app transactions. Up until late last week, if you wanted to buy something to read using the app on your iOS or iPadOS device, the process went something like this:
- Peruse the Amazon Kindle Bookstore using your Apple handset's Kindle app
- Find a book that looks interesting
- Switch to Safari (or Firefox or Google Chrome—but on an iPhone, they're really all just Safari) and navigate to Amazon.com
- Forget that you were actually looking for a book. Order a garden hose and a box of 12 bottles of Mio Lemonade Water enhancer
- Wonder why the hell you have nothing to read as you water your grass, drinking lemonade
Happily, thanks to some new laws, we've come back in a time when we can blow our money on books we don't really own instead of unwanted gardening implements we were hypnotized into purchasing. If you find a book you think you'll dig in the Kindle app, tap the new button in the app's UI, marked 'Get Book.' Safari will open to the book's bookstore page. Now, buy the damn book, sans distraction. It's not as clean as the process of buying a book on a Kindle edition-reader. But, it's a helluva lot less clunky than it once was.
But hey, if you're going to go through all this effort to get an ebook on you device, why not buy one from a site like Bookshop.org, instead. A good chunk of every purchase of a book from the website goes towards supporting the small, independent bookstore of your choice.
Previously:
• After 11 years, I upgraded my Kindle e-reader, again
• I removed the DRM from my Amazon Kindle ebooks
