Amazon App Allows Kindle Books on PCs

Amazon will introduce a free software app next month that will allow Kindle users to read their e-books on their PCs. What's more, the app works for non-Kindle owners: Anyone with an Amazon account will be able to buy the books and download them to their Window-based computers, notes CNET. (A Mac app will come later.) The move comes as Amazon faces stepped-up competition and is working to make its e-reader as user-friendly as possible.

"Amazon, unsurprisingly, isn’t positioning the Windows-based Kindle app as a replacement for its Kindle device," writes Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet. "Instead, as it does currently with the iPhone, it is positioning it as a complement to a Kindle reader." (More Amazon stories.)