• May 20, 2009

Amazon Wednesday announced the latest version its Kindle for iPhone application, offering new features including the ability to read books lengthwise (in landscape mode), to tap to turn a page and zoom in on images. The update also lets users select alternate background and text colors for easier reading in low-light conditions.

Amazon said the changes reflect the most requested features by customers. Launched in March, the free Kindle app gives people access to more than 280,000 books wirelessly on their iPhones. Buying a book requires using a Web browser such as Safari to make the purchase via Amazon's Kindle Store. Users can't browse and buy books directly within the app.

Amazon earlier this month announced the Kindle DX, which sports a larger screen than the Kindle 2 for reading newspapers and magazines and will retail for $489 when released this summer.

The Kindle is becoming an increasingly bigger force in the publishing industry: eMarketer reported that 10% of all book sales in North America in Q1 2009 were for the device -- about 4 million of 38 million books sold. --Mark Walsh