Kindle Cloud Reader in a nutshell

Those of your who buy e-books at Amazon must be aware of Kindle Cloud Reader application that provides you with a way of reading Kindle e-books through the browser at any place you like it.  May it be a mobile phone,  a tablet or a desktop.

Finding, buying and reading e-books is much more easier than their paper counterparts and you do not have to carry tons of books at your bag to read a few at once. In addition, digital format make it simple to look up words in a dictionary or on the internet, for instance, using Google Translate or Google search.

However, this is not the case with Kindle Cloud Reader. Currently, the is no built-in internet search or internet translate functionality in the Kindle Cloud Reader. More over, there is no option to copy and paste your favorite quotes or text snippets neither. If you’ll search at various forums you’ll see that customers desperately looking for, at least, copy functionality.

It is a very strange state of things, considering that this functionality very much exists in Android powered Amazon Kindle application as your may see in the screenshot below.

So what’s the matter with Amazon?

As a persistent Amazon customer who is pretty satisfied with their services I thought that the lack of this functionality is a mere unawareness to this issue from Amazon’s side. That is why I wrote them asking to fix this annoying discrepancy on July, 2015. And this is the answer I got.

Your Account Amazon.com Message From Customer Service Hello, I understand Kindle for android do not have the feature mentioned by you but I do not know that exact reason why the Kindle developers team have not involved these features on Kindle for Android app. I understand that you are interested in these features on your Android device. Definitely this feature would be of great help to our customers if it is available. It’s unfortunate that this feature is not available right now. I’m glad that you’ve contacted us about this feature request. I also apologize to let you know that right now, we don’t have this feature in use. Since you’re interested in this feature, I’ve passed your message to the Kindle development Team for review and consideration. I’m sure that these features on Kindle for android device will make our customers Kindle experience more convenient. I want to let you know that we are working on additional feature for our Kindle as part of the next software. Please be assured that your feedback will be considered as we plan further improvements.Your patience and co-operation is highly appreciated in this matter. I once again apologize for not assisting you in this issue as the feature is not available now. But your feedback will be of great importance for us now and we will definitely try to bring this feature soon. For the meantime, please extend with us your patience and understanding while we work on this. Please know that we value our customers satisfaction and convenience above all else it’s the foundation on which our company was built. If you need any further assistance please write to us : http://www.amazon.com/kindlesupport Thanks for using Kindle. Have a pleasant day ahead! Best regards, Noel S

As you may see customer support has provided no clue when it’ll be done if ever. Not to mention that they mistakenly answered me about Android application, which has this functionality built-in, when I asked about Kindle Cloud Reader. Since then almost 2.5 years have passed.

Facts

• As of today Kindle Cloud Reader Chrome extension is used by 3,649,498 users world wide. This is a large amount of user I would say.

 

• There is no support for basic features, such as copy, internet search, internet translate in Kindle Cloud Reader.

• Amazon Kindle application has those features built-in as you may see in the screenshot below and has only 739,148 user so far.

• Implementation of the proposed functionality must take a few hours for Amazon’s developers.

Why am I so sure that it takes a few hours to fix this?

I am sure that fixing this will take between two to three hours because due to the lack of this functionality I had to implement it myself. Thanks to this open source repository  I was able to add Google Search and Translate, Copy functionality to Kindle Cloud Reader application. It is currently used by about several thousands users weekly. This amount indicates that these functionalities are needed by customers. However, since I do not understand deeply the design of the Kindle Cloud Reader it is pretty complicated to refactor this application further. In my opinion, this is exactly where Amazon must step in and introduce the fix. 

Meanwhile

Meanwhile, use Kindle Optimizer Chrome Extension if copy, search and translate is what you lack.

Check out the implementation at GitHub.