Amazon recently revealed plans to bring its Kindle e-book application to Google's Android mobile platform. I got a hands-on demo of the software prototype, which the book vendor brought to Google I/O. Much like the desktop and iPhone versions, it has support for synchronizing with Amazon's cloud. Page number, notes, and other information will transparently match up across all supported devices.

Screen readability is good and offers a solid reading experience. Users can select from several different font sizes and background colors. Options include a sepia mode and a white-on-black mode for night reading. The application user interface has a brightness adjustment slider, but it wasn't yet functional in the prototype that I tested.

The application lacks a built-in bookstore, but it can automatically sync content that the user has purchased. To add a book from the device itself, the user visits Amazon's website, purchases a book, and then uses the reader application's synchronization feature to pull it down onto the device. When the user deletes a book from the device in order to free up storage space, it is still accessible from an "archive" menu which can be used to re-download the content.

Amazon's application is not a general-purpose reader—it can only display books from Amazon's own bookstore. If you want to read other kinds of content, such as free e-books from Project Gutenberg, you will still need a separate third-party reader application like FBReader or Aldiko.

I often read e-books on my cell phone when I travel. I recently managed to get through two William Gibson novels during the flights to and from the Ubuntu Developer Summit that took place earlier this month in Brussels. Getting e-books on my phone today is often a bit of a chore. The ability to buy books over the air and have them available and fully synced on all of my devices will be a welcome addition to the Android platform.