As with all of its applications, Kindle for Android will include Whispersync — which synchronizes information including last page read, etc. across all Kindle applications and devices automatically.

Those wishing to use Kindle will need Android OS 1.6 or newer and an SD card. Specifically, Amazon has mentioned that the software would work on the Droid Incredible, Google Nexus One, HTC MyTouch, Motorola CLIQ, and Motorola Droid on a page announcing the launch of the application.

No specific details on availability have been announced, although a statement from the company says “this summer” — which could mean next month or September for all we know.

Not all books for Kindle include DRM — Amazon leaves it up to the publisher to decide whether or not they would like to protect their content. It is likely the company will rush to patch the hole opened by the hacker, although it was not immediately responding to requests for comment Wednesday.

The hack was developed as an entry to a contest on hacking.org.il, where participants were tasked with finding a way to open up the AZW format to allow it to be read on other devices. The hack took about eight days for Labba to complete. The hack is actually an application that is installed onto the device, which then converts the files to the mobi format. Be forwarned though that Amazon has apparently already pushed out code for the Kindle that breaks these scripts, although it is reported it does not auto-update the device.

“A very small percentage of customers” that ordered for pre-Christmas shipping that will not be fulfilled will receive a $100 gift certificate to the retailer, the company said Monday. Those affected were alerted on Friday. If you ask me, its a pretty sweet consolation prize considering these folks essentially just got the device for $159.

Here’s an idea: give the gift card to the recipient and you just bought them a few books to go along with their shiny new Nook when it arrives!

Like the Kindle, the Nook is seeing the same problems with fulfilling demand early on. There is about a two month wait — at least — for those who ordered their devices after November 20.  If Amazon’s history with Kindle sales is any indication, it could be well into the new year before supply and demand equalizes.

In any case, this demand should be heartening to the e-book/e-reader industry as a whole. It now appears that there is a large enough market for these devices, something that some analysts questioned early on during the days of the Kindle.

Maybe too it might just be a fad — that’s entirely possible and God knows tech has had so many gadget ideas that come in a blaze of glory and exit stage right with its tail between its legs.

As for me? I personally still like the idea of paper too much, but maybe I’m old fashioned…

He’s right that the whole idea is sort of pointless. As I wrote back in this piece, killers are exceedingly rare–and it seems like even the smartest tech watchers aren’t very good at identifying them until the killing is largely done.

But Lines’ piece got me wondering: Just which products have we fixated on the notion of some other new product killing most often? I decided to try to rank them based on Googleosity: The frequency with which terms such as “iPhone Killer,” “Twitter Killer,” and “Facebook Killer” show up in the Google index.

This is an exceptionally crude experiment–all of the results include some pages (lots of them, actually) that have nothing to do with product-killing. And some terms, such as Xbox Killer and Craiglist Killer pull up so many items about violent death that it’s pointless to include them at all.

But hey, let’s try this again, for the first 35 gadgets, services, and software products that came to my mind.

1. iPhone Killer: 732,000
2. Kindle Killer: 272,000
3. iPod Killer: 118,000
4. Google Killer: 99,300
5. Twitter Killer: 75,300
6. Yahoo Killer: 65,600
7. Facebook Killer: 55,900
8. Wii Killer: 50,200
9. Firefox Killer: 49,900
10. Windows Killer: 37,800
11. PS2 Killer: 28,200
12. Hotmail Killer: 19,900
13. BlackBerry Killer: 19,500
14. eBay Killer: 18.400
15. Microsoft Word Killer: 16,100
16. MacBook Killer: 14,600
17. Linux Killer: 13,500
18. PowerPoint Killer: 12,600
19. TiVo Killer: 11,300
20. MSN Killer: 10,700
21. Excel Killer: 5,770
22. AOL Killer: 5,410
23. RAZR Killer: 5,120
24. Friendster Killer: 4,480
25. Gmail Killer: 1,480
26. Netscape Killer: 1,360
27. AltaVista Killer: 1,170
28. Walkman Killer: 1,070
29. Mac Killer: 944
30. Polaroid Killer: 356
31. WordPerfect Killer: 133
32. IBM PC Killer: 9
33. CompuServe Killer: 4
34. StarTac Killer: 2
35. Victrola Killer: 0

Like I say, this is a very imprecise exercise, but it does seem that the world has spent more time fixated on would-be iPhone killers than those with murderous intentions against any other tech product. I also get the sense that the whole concept of product killers is largely one of recent times. Maybe it’s a fad–I kind of hope so…

Pirate Bay: Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!

Annoy Amazon, lose Kindle books.

Report: Best Buy plans downloads.

Voting on Facebook policies begins.

Slim new Sidekick does Twitter.

Office 2010 gets public beta.

Kutcher’s a Twitter follower millionaire.

This e-paper display does color.

If there is a Barnes & Noble e-reader, it’ll have plenty company. There’s Plastic Logic’s upcoming device. Fujitsu is about to release its fancy FLEPia in Japan. Magazine publisher Hearst is working on an e-reader. Rupert Murdoch is making noises about jumping into the market. And then there are the gadgets that are already here: Amazon.com’s Kindle 2, Sony’s Reader, and dark horses such as the iRex iLiad.

All of which leaves me thinking one thing: I wish that the publishing and technology industries would take a deep breath, step back, and declare a moratorium on new e-book gizmos and platforms until they can agree on one file format for e-books that’ll work on every reader. It would be nice if that format was free of copy protection, but I’m willing to settle for DRM as long as it works well, and works with everything,

The books I’ve bought for my Kindle will work on the Kindle and other devices Amazon chooses to support, such as the iPhone. (Which means that even if another company comes up with a gadget that’s ten times better than the Kindle, I’m unlikely to switch,) The books Sony sells work on Sony’s reader. We don’t know what formats a Barnes & Noble e-reader will work with, but I’m guessing it doesn’t want Amazon or Borders selling tomes for its hardware. And so on.

One of the multiple wonderful things about human eyeballs is that they’re compatible with everything you can look at: I’ve got books I’ve owned since I was two that I still pull out from time to time. But e-books that are tied to a particular platform are dead ends: You’ll be lucky if you can still read them five years from now, let alone a few decades into the future.

I cheerfully admit that I’m pretty much ignorant when it comes to what’s going on with open e-book standards. I just know that I’m not going to get too excited about any new e-reader until I know that any digital book or magazine I buy anywhere will work on it…

In a protest outside of the guild’s Manhattan office today, demonstrators urged the guild to cease its campaign to remove text-to-speech from the Kindle. The guild maintains that it goes beyond the publishing rights that Amazon has acquired, and could impact audio book sales.

Amazon has yielded to the guild’s demands, and is permitting the feature to be turned off on a per-title basis. To its credit, the guild has worked out an agreement for the voice feature to always be an option for people with disabilities.

“Authors want everyone to read their books. We’ve been strongly supportive of the rights of the blind and disabled to obtain books…We know how to balance the interests, to make sure there is special access to books for people who need it but still protect markets that authors depend on. Audio-books is one of those markets,” Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, told News.com.

My feeling is that text-to-speech should be broadly available as part of an accessibility pack. While I take Mr. Aiken at his word, today’s protest served to remind the guild that it has an obligation to the blind that transcends its sales and the exercise of its intellectual property rights.

Despite everything, it’s a delight to have Kindle on the iPhone. What makes Kindle Kindle isn’t software as much as it is content–240,000 books’ worth of it, by far the largest collection of e-books ever assembled. Getting access to those books on a phone is by far the biggest deal in content for Apple devices since Apple itself added moves and TV shows to the iTunes Store. And given that there are far more iPhones and iPod Touches on the planet than Kindle devices, this could be a bigger moment for electronic books than the introduction of the Kindle in 2007 was.

The basics of Kindle on the iPhone are pretty much what you’d expect: You read books a page at a time, flicking through them with your thumb. You read in a full-screen mode that maximizes real estate for words, but tapping the screen gives you a pop-up interface with tools for bookmarking, changing text size (there are five options), and the like. [UPDATE AFTER HAVING PLAYED WITH KINDLE FOR IPHONE A BIT MORE: Having to swipe your thumb to flip pages is kinda uncomfortable, and you do it a lot when reading--I wish that you could turn pages by simply tapping.] And for the first time, Kindle books appear in real black text on a real white background rather than the Kindle device’s grayish E-ink display:

Typographically, iPhone Kindle “pages” have reasonably crisp type, but there’s no hyphenation, which occasionally leads to ungainly justification with way too much white space, as in the line “realistic-looking cloth rabbit” below:

Overall, the wonderful public-domain book reader Classics shows it’s possible to do more elegant type on an iPhone:

On the plus side, photos that look terrible on the Kindle 2′s 16-shade E-ink screen look dandy on the iPhone:

You can buy new books on your iPhone in a pinch, but only by browsing plain old Amazon.com in Mobile Safari–it hasn’t been optimized for iPhone, and the Kindle app itself suggests you do your buying on a computer or a Kindle. A feature called Whispersync syncs your bookmarks across all devices you read books on–a practically mandatory task if you own a Kindle device and an iPhone, since it lets you pick up reading on one device where you left off on the other. And, of course, you get access to any books you bought previously on a Kindle device. But magazines and blogs I’d subscribed to on my Kindle 2 didn’t travel to the iPhone.

In fact, it’s not clear whether you can get magazines, newspapers, and blogs on an iPhone at all–when I tried to subscribe to the New York Times in Mobile Safari, the Amazon site promisingly made reference to sending it to an iPhone:

But then it asked me to select a specific Kindle to download it to–and Kindle for iPhone wasn’t an option. And Amazon’s press release for Kindle for iPhone makes no reference to anything but books being available. (Too bad–it would be cool to be able to have the Times or The New Yorker downloaded to an iPhone for reading in unconnected places like airplanes.)

Also confusing: When I first launched Kindle for iPhone, books I already owned were in an “Archive” section, with thumbnails of their cover art:

But when I downloaded them to the iPhone, some of them inexplicably lost their pretty covers:

And some filled the iPhone’s screen while others were mysteriously undersized:

(I’ll try to get answers from Amazon on the glitches I’ve encountered, and will update this review as relevant.)

Kindle for iPhone is also missing a few Kindle 2 features that some folks might pine for, including highlighting (I did notice that highlights I’d created on my Kindle showed up on the iPhone) and note-taking, the ability to search, and a built-in dictionary. And it’s no stunner that the controversial text-to-speech book-reading feature is nowhere to be found.

I’ve spent most of this piece picking nits, and yet I’m still excited to be able to buy and read honest-to-goodness mainstream books for reasonable prices (usually $9.99 and under) on a device I have with me everywhere I go. The fundamentals are in place, but this app is bursting with the potential to go much further.

I’m not sure if this first pass at Kindle for iPhone is on the basic side because:

1) Amazon rushed it out the door and has grand plans to make it better and better, until it’s just as ambitious as the iPhone’s software for listening to music and watching movies and TV shows;

2) It thinks that nobody’s really going to do all that much book reading on an iPhone, and therefore the app doesn’t need to be very fancy;

3) It’s intentionally dumbing down the iPhone app to prevent it from discouraging people from buying $360 Kindle devices.

But I very much hope that option 1) comes closest to explaining the company’s motivations and plans…and that 3) is way off base. (Which it probably is–the full-blown Kindle’s larger screen and vastly better battery life make it far better for serious, extended reading; I think the existence of a good Kindle for iPhone is more likely to boost Kindle sales than to depress them, and I’ll bet Amazon agrees.)

[UPDATE: Here's a grid comparing some major pros, cons, specs, and features of Kindle 2 and Kindle for iPhone.]

More to come, including comparisons of Kindle for iPhone with other iPhone e-book options, such as Shortcovers, which launched last week…

Ultimately, I think most owners of intellectual property will eventually come to decisions that serve the people who watch, listen to, or read their works, since behaving too stupidly for too long will leave you without any customers. But it’s OK by me if creators find their own comfort level, even if it’s different from what I’d choose.

(Side note: You may well argue that it’s artists, not industries, that create things…and you’d be right. Possible fodder for the comments, or for a future post.)

All of which is a roundabout way of getting to today’s news that Amazon has responded to the Author’s’ Guild’s angst over the Kindle 2′s text-to-speech book reading feature by letting publishers decide whether the feature should be enabled on a particular book or not.

(Shameless plug: Here’s my review of the Kindle 2. I liked it–and will continue to like it even if I can’t listen to books in a surprisingly-good-but-still-robotic voice.)

The Author’s Guild maintains that the Kindle feature violates copyright by being something akin to a public performance and endangers writers’ livelihoods by competing with audiobooks; Amazon says that it’s legal and is good for the industry, but it believes “many rightsholders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver’s seat.”

(Additional side note: Engadget did a good interview with Paul Aiken of the Author’s Guild–read it for the Guild’s stance and see for yourself how good a case he makes.)

Amazon, which has done an admirable job of getting publishers on the Kindle bandwagon–to the tune of a quarter-million books to date–was obviously in a tough spot. Publishers who are uncomfortable with the Kindle might withhold rights. No books, no successful Kindle. And if the Kindle failed, it would be a huge problem for the whole nascent concept of e-books.

I do have an opinion here, and it’s pretty much the same one as my friend Steve Wildstrom of BusinessWeek: The Kindle is good for the book business, not bad, and the more cool features it has, the better. And if I’d written any books, I’d enable Kindle text-to-speech in a heartbeat. What I’d be worried about is technology allowing people to pirate books–not technology letting people who pay for books enjoy them in new ways,

But that’s me. Let the People Who Create Stuff Make Their Own Damn Mistakes, I say–even if hurts their chances of making money off their works.

(Final side note: I know at least one person who wrote two books that available both on the Kindle and in audiobook form, and whose take on this matter I’d value. She happens to be my sister, and I just dropped her a note to see what her stance is on text-to-speech.)

Okay, now for an entirely different aspect of this development. It was just weeks ago that Jeff Bezos stood on stage talking up the Kindle 2:

He talked up the text-to-speech and told prospective customers that “When you want it to, it reads to you.” Amazon is now saying, basically, that the Kindle will read to owners when the publishers want it to–even though it says that there was nothing illegal with the feature. I assume that Amazon will push out a software update that disables universal text-to-speech.

Amazon has amended its description of text-to-speech to say that it works “unless the book is disabled by the rights holder.” But the video on its Kindle page still says the feature works, period:

So here’s a question for you: Is it kosher for tech companies to yank features in products they already sold you simply because they changed their mind about whether they were such a great idea?

Asus preps ultra-thin netebook.

Newsday’s site wants your money.

Apple kills Emoji (er, Emoji?).

Amazon Kindle 3 Rumors. Already?

JPG Magazine will return soon.

“Vista-Capable” lawyers fight on.

Google is Tweeting. Very successfully.

Hearst plans Kindle for magazines.

Japan stops BlackBerry Bold sales.

No surprise: identity theft up.

Pirate Bay wife gets flowers.

PC makers’ Windows 7 opinions.

Finally, Windows/Android phone virtualization!