As eagerly as I slammed Amazon for dissing ePub, let me praise it for the fine dictionary and other wrinkles in the just-updated Kindle apps for the iPhone, iPod and iPad.
Fittingly, I’m in the middle of reading Losing Mum and Pup, a sprightly memoir by Christopher Buckley, son of the late William F. Buckley, Jr. WFB, my political opposite, was a strong supporter of the TeleRead vision of a well-stocked national digital library system. Maybe partly in deference to the father, the son’s memoir serves up more than its share of Latin and French phrases. Jeff Bezos’s dictionary, as you can see to the left, is up to the task at hand.
You’ll also notice that the updates include Google and Wikipedia lookups, and as a bonus, it’s easier than before for me to select text on my iPad for notes or highlighting. Also handy will be the new search function. It can display multiple occurrences of a word.
Jeff, this is all good stuff. Just please—let Kindle hardware and the apps also work their magic on ePub.
And while you’re at it, I still would like the bold-all-text function I’ve been begging major vendors for. Even with good hardware, some of us can enjoy e-books more easily that way.
I’ve been playing with the new features and you know what: unexpectedly Kindle can be used as a standalone dictionary application. It’s due to a fact, that to make a dictionary working “The New Oxford Dictionary” is being downloaded to a personal bookshelf.
And this is just an excellent idea.
More details: http://www.passwordincorrect.com/2010/07/30/kindle-for-ios-updated-use-it-as-a-free-dictionary-app/