Late on Tuesday, Amazon deployed its new Cloud Reader, a multiplatform HTML5 web app for reading and buying Kindle e-books in a web browser. Wednesday morning, the company issued a press release about the new product, after Wired’s Charlie Sorrel and many others had already written up their first impressions.

So, the cat is well out of the bag. We’ve known this was coming after Amazon pulled the purchase functionality from its iOS apps, Kobo announced its own HTML5 bookstore web app and especially since Amazon launched a Kindle for the web beta site almost a year ago.

Cloud Reader’s design is almost identical to the revamped Kindle for Mac desktop client released last October.

So, I don’t think this is only about sidestepping Apple and its 30-percent tollbooth on in-app sales.

The new HTML5 store really works and makes sense on the iPad: Click Kindle Store on the desktop, it just opens up Amazon.com in a new Safari window. (The iPhone/iPod Touch version of Safari isn’t supported at all.) Otherwise, it seems like a straightforward extension of Amazon’s longstanding “buy once, read everywhere” strategy of extending the reach of users’ libraries to as many devices as possible.

So, what’s genuinely new here? What’s still incomplete? And what can both the new and the incomplete parts tell us about where e-books — and the people and machines that love them — are headed next?

Continue reading …

New: OK, the iPad- and touchscreen-optimized bookstore is very cool. I don’t own an iPad, so I borrowed one this morning to check it out. As a catalog app, it could be fun to play with even if you couldn’t use it to read books.

But it’s not just about giving iPad owners a shiny place to shop, or cutting Apple out of the money. It’s about reducing the friction between shopping and reading. Despite its lack of a shiny interface, frictionless shopping is what makes the Kindle proper so powerful — and sometimes dangerous.

You can buy and download a book anywhere in the world and begin reading it immediately. It’s that difference, that expectation of immediate reward, that helps funnel the customer all the way through to sale — and I’d argue that its completed sales rate might matter as much to Amazon as forking over or holding onto that extra 30 percent.

Now that frictionless experience is back on the iPad, and there in full form for the first time on the desktop. If you’re at work, on a friend’s computer, or a relative’s, you can log in, buy a book and start reading right away. Then you can pick it up later on your Kindle or in the iPad or Android Kindle app proper.

(Yes, people: I just told you how you can buy and read e-books all day at work. Keep it quiet until the bosses catch on and IT starts blocking every Amazon URL.)

Incomplete: Here I’ll just hit the bullet points. In Cloud Reader, you currently cannot:

• Use an unsupported browser (that would be most of them).
• Highlight text or write notes (you can read older notes).
• Copy-and-paste text.
• Share text or notes over social media like Twitter and Facebook (you can do this in the iOS Kindle app now).
• Read or buy magazines or other periodicals (you can do this in the iOS Kindle app now, too).
• Read enhanced books with audio/video that Amazon sells for iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone.
• You can’t read EPUB3, the emerging — but still incomplete — e-book standard that is HTML5 but isn’t used by the Kindle. Or Nook. Or iBooks. Even for the enhanced books that sometimes use HTML5 audio and video.

In fact, just about the only people experimenting with EPUB3 are HTML5- and cloud-based e-reading companies like ThreePress, who have an HTML5 webapp with local storage very similar to Amazon’s Cloud Reader called Ibis Reader.

I asked Liza Daly, one the developers of Ibis Reader, about the benefits and trade-offs of displaying e-books in a web browser instead of using a client application or dedicated device. “There’s a modern web browser in everything with a screen these days,” Daly says:

Ibis Reader was originally written by just two people, and we’re still small. There’s no way a two-person company can produce dozens of native applications for different operating systems and devices. That same economy is valuable to big companies too, of course, but the native app approach is certainly more tractable to an organization like Amazon (as long as they are willing to abide by the platform regulations of other corporations).

Going to the web helps you get around those restrictions. “The web browser that comes with the Nook Color is HTML5-capable and can run the full Ibis Reader application.” (And if Amazon would support the Nook’s browser, I bet it could run Amazon Cloud Reader too, giving the company another foothold on another popular device. And maybe a real fight with Barnes & Noble.)

The biggest advantage of building and deploying a cloud-based e-reader is that you only need the resources most web developers already have. “You don’t need to download a complex IDE or learn a new specialty language like Objective C,” says Daly. “When you’re done, you don’t need anyone’s permission to launch your app — it’s the open web, you can do what you like.”

HTML5 levels the playing field, making it easier for small companies who are willing to be more experimental than big ones.

The high-volume, text-heavy trade market is largely spoken for, Daly tells me. The agency model means the major publishers set the prices, and the big retailers fight each other for market share.

High-design content, textbooks, interactivity, social reading, books for niche audiences: This is what can grow in the shade, hidden in the tiny corners of the web.

In short, Amazon’s Cloud Reader can’t do most of the things that we associate with the web, mobile devices or HTML5. You can’t share what you’re reading about with other people, and you can’t enjoy rich multimedia. On the desktop, you can’t easily use Cloud Reader — or for that matter, the Kindle desktop apps — to do research or write about what you’re reading.

You can’t respond. All you can do is consume. You can read, but your reading generally cannot create value.

There I’m borrowing some language from Paul Saffo’s explication of “the creator economy“:

Now we are entering a third age in which the central economic actor is someone who both produces and consumes in the same act. I like the term ‘creator,’ as this new kind of actor is doing something more fundamental than the mere sum of their simultaneous production and consumption. Creators are ordinary people whose everyday actions create value.

In a new essay titled “What Comes After Reading on iPad,” designer Khoi Vinh (formerly of The New York Times) cites Saffo, arguing that this media companies have mistakenly approached the iPad solely for consumption:

If you judged the iPad purely by what most journalists write about it, you’d think that its most interesting characteristic is its potential as a new delivery channel for electronic books, magazines and newspapers…. [B]y inadvertently furthering the belief that the iPad is mostly just good for reading, they distract from the device’s many other unique qualities…

In actuality, the iPad upends our understanding of productivity.

It’ll probably always be easier to do ‘professional’ work on a laptop, but professional work is not the only kind of creation that’s possible. You can be highly productive on the iPad if you’re creating something different from spreadsheets and slide decks — the problem is, that something hasn’t been invented yet.

In his post, Vinh seems to be pointing to something other than reading, perhaps some elements or synthesis of gaming and interactive television.

But I’d argue that reading already is this kind of creative consumption, and has been for as long as we can remember. We’re always gathering news, adding notes, sharing what we know, engaging with others and adding value. We already do this on the Kindle, on the iPad, on the Nook or Kobo, and it certainly is in our web browsers.

One of the only place we can’t, at least not easily, is in Amazon’s Cloud Reader as it exists today.

Now, let me be clear: Despite its long development, this is still an early product. To some extent, Amazon has been forced by Apple’s new app-purchasing rules to bring it out of beta as soon as the iPad store component was ready. An Amazon representative told me by e-mail that additional features are on the way to Cloud Reader, but that we would have to stay tuned for exactly what those features would be and when they would be rolling out.

The only specific question the rep answered is that there is nothing in Amazon’s agreements with publishers of magazines, periodicals or textbooks that prevents Amazon from selling or displaying those products in Cloud Reader. So while Cloud Reader 1.0 may be hamstrung, Cloud Reader 1.5 or 2.0 might be ready to rock ‘n’ roll, bringing the web app at least up to parity with the iOS apps.

I’m also not trying to be grumpy for its own sake, or hate on Amazon because its brand-new web reader doesn’t do everything I’ve ever wanted an e-reader to ever do. In fact, it’s the opposite. What Cloud Reader begins to do, I think, is open up our options, getting us to where we can all begin expecting something more.

There’s a story about the early days of British punk (specifically, I think it’s about the great London band Wire, although the internet refuses to confirm my memory of this) about a fan at a show who stood next to the stage speakers, nodding his head, exhorting the band after every song, “all right, that’s good, now next time do it louder and faster.”

At this point, e-books have arrived; they are mainstream. They are an industry. Every fan should be exhorting everyone making e-books, from the center to the margins, to keep making them better, louder, faster.