Amazon Now Has Your Kindle Books in the Cloud

We are excited to take this leap forward in our 'Buy Once, Read Everywhere' mission and help customers access their library instantly from anywhere," said Dorothy Nicholls, Director, Amazon Kindle. "We have written the application from the ground up in HTML5, so that customers can also access their content offline directly from their browser. The flexibility of HTML5 allows us to build one application that automatically adapts to the platform you're using - from Chrome to iOS. To make it easy and seamless to discover new books, we've added an integrated, touch optimized store directly into Cloud Reader, allowing customers one click access to a vast selection of books."

Features of Kindle Cloud Reader include:

An immersive view of your entire Kindle library, with instant access to all of your books

Start reading over 950,000 Kindle books instantly within your browser

An embedded Kindle Store optimized for your web browser makes it seamless to discover new books and start reading them instantly

New Kindle Store for iPad is built from the ground up for iPad's touch interface

Your current book is automatically made available for offline use, and you can choose to save a book for reading offline at any time

Receive automatic software updates without the need to download new software

Select any book to start reading, customize the page layout to your desired font size, text color, background color, and more

View all of the notes, highlights, and bookmarks that you've made on other Kindle apps or on Kindle

Sync your last page read across your Kindle and free Kindle apps so you can always pick up where you left off

Kindle Cloud Reader is available for Safari on iPad, Safari on desktop and Chrome starting today. Kindle Cloud Reader on the iPad is optimized for the size and unique touch interface of iPad. Without even leaving the app, customers can start shopping in the Kindle Store and will find a unique and immersive shopping experience built specifically for iPad's Safari browser.

Kindle Cloud Reader will be available on additional web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, the BlackBerry PlayBook browser, and other mobile browsers, in the coming months.

Amazon.com customers can start reading their Kindle books immediately using Kindle Cloud Reader at www.amazon.com/cloudreader. 

Dropbox Has Some 'Splaining to Do

A code glitch left the popular cloud storage service, Dropbox without password protection for about four hours on Monday.

During this time, anyone could access any of Dropbox's 25 million user accounts by typing in any password.

The lapse occurred between 1:54 p.m. to 5:46 p.m. PT. According to Dropbox's blog post, "much less" than one percent of its members logged in during this period. However, the company still isn't clear whether any improper behavior occurred during the time. If you suspect any strange activity on your account, you can email support@dropbox.com.

Dropbox encrypts data for its users, which gives the company the power to access its users' data. Most likely, the reasoning behind this is in case a user forgets his or her password. However, Dropbox says the company falsely advertised on its website that only the user could access his own data.

At the time Dropbox countered that it has "strict policy prohibitions" and "access controls" to prevent most of their employeesfrom being able to access user files.

Nonetheless, Monday's problem calls into question the usability of Dropbox.