Amazon brings Kindle to iPhone

NEW YORK (AP) — In bringing its Kindle e-book reader to a much larger audience through the iPhone and iPod Touch, Amazon.com Inc. may benefit even if the additional eyeballs don’t translate into actual sales of the $359 Kindle device.

Seattle-based Amazon rolled out the free program Wednesday, bringing several Kindle functions to the Apple gadgets’ smaller screens. The application can be downloaded from Apple’s online application store and lets iPhone and iPod Touch users read the same electronic books that Kindle owners can buy on Amazon.com.

The application’s release comes a few weeks after Amazon unveiled the second-generation Kindle. The company has not released sales figures for the device, which it began selling in late 2007, but Citi Investment Research analyst Mark Mahaney recently estimated that the company sold 500,000 Kindles in 2008.

Regardless of how many Kindles have been snapped up, the availability of the Kindle program on the iPhone and iPod gives Amazon millions more potential e-book buyers — 4.3 million 3G iPhones alone were sold in the U.S. in 2008.

And while Amazon hopes that the application will translate into increased sales for both e-books and the Kindle device, Creative Strategies Inc. tech analyst Tim Bajarin said he believes the former is the more important result in extending Kindle capabilities to Apple’s products.

Amazon has 240,000 books available for the Kindle, and its library will grow. The more e-books you have, the more people you need to buy them, he said.

“If you’ve only limited it to a Kindle [device] audience, you don’t have exponential growth,” he said.