Kindle ebooks: How to buy and install them now that the store is gone

Kindle ebooks: How to buy and install them now that the store is gone -

Since Amazon acquiesced to Apple's onerous rules and removed the one-click buy button from the Kindle apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, a couple of mainstream websites have whined that it's "too hard to buy ebooks on your iPad now." Yes, it is horribly difficult -- you now have to click or tap twice to buy and download a book instead of just once. I'm going to take you through this back-breaking and time-consuming process, just to show you how hard Apple has made it for us to buy ebooks from anywhere but the iBookstore.

To start, launch Safari on your device and navigate to the Kindle bookstore. To keep from wearing yourself out doing this in the future, add a button to your iPad or iPhone home screen by tapping the Share button in Safari and then tapping the "Add to Home Screen" button. Make sure you're logged in with the account that you use for your Kindle purchases, and then find the book you want to purchase in the Kindle Store.

Now, here comes the hard part, so be sure to pay attention. Over on the right side of the screen is a button marked "Buy now with 1-click." Just below it is a drop-down menu listing all of your Kindle devices, which in my case consists of the Kindle app on two Macs, an iPad 2, and an iPhone 4.

Select the first device you want to have the ebook delivered to, and then click (or tap) the Buy now button -- that's the first tap, and in the old days before Apple made our lives difficult with their burdensome rules, that would be the only tap you'd have to make. Instead, now a new page appears thanking you for your purchase. In my example, I picked my iPad 2 as the target for the book, and the web page asked if I wanted to open Kindle for iPad to begin downloading the book.

With a tap of the "Go to Kindle for iPad" button, the Kindle app launches and the ebook is downloaded. What??? I have to make a second tap to download my book? I demand that Apple make retribution for this oppressive over-control of my life!

It's not as easy as just tapping one button in the Kindle app and having the ebook automagically appear on your bookshelf, but once you've found the book, it just takes two taps for it to show up. And yes, I am being totally sarcastic with this post.

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)