Erudite Book Reader brings Amazon Kindle ebooks to Symbian

Published by at

Although first party clients for some of the major services may never come to Symbian, the developer community is stepping up to the mark with workarounds again, this time with an Amazon Kindle 'client', in the form of 'Erudite Book Reader', shown below. It effectively acts as a middle man between the Kindle 'Cloud Reader' web site and Symbian, making sure that the reading and downloading experience is acceptable. Just don't expect too much...

Here's a walkthrough, to give you an idea:

Screenshot, Erudite (Kindle for Symbian)Screenshot, Erudite (Kindle for Symbian)

Brand new in the Nokia Store... Introducing Erudite Book Reader, written by student Mike Sheldon; it's soon obvious that what we have here is a QtWebKit shell on top of a web browser instance, accessing Amazon's Kindle 'Cloud Reader'. The top status bar and bottom 'back' toolbar remain throughout - and note that tapping the back icon exits the app - so stay away!

Screenshot, Erudite (Kindle for Symbian)Screenshot, Erudite (Kindle for Symbian)

You can ignore the pop-ups as a rule, since Erudite manages things like downloads for you; a typical Kindle home page (we don't use it much on this account, these are my daughter's picks, in case you were wondering!)

Screenshot, Erudite (Kindle for Symbian)Screenshot, Erudite (Kindle for Symbian)

The default is black on white, though a tap of the Cloud Reader settings icon gives the screen, right, where you can change most of the cosmetics, including white on black (more AMOLED-friendly) and a larger font

Screenshot, Erudite (Kindle for Symbian)Screenshot, Erudite (Kindle for Symbian)

Jumping about within a book using the Cloud Reader menu; within a book you tap on the left or right of a page to go backwards or forwards; tapping near the top brings up the menu bar shown, tapping at the bottom shows how far you are through the title.

Books are automatically downloaded in the background once you've started reading them here, which is handy, and offline reading does work, though Erudite Book Reader pops up intermittent complaints about 'connections not being available'.

Overall, there were occasional delays and missed taps, plus my initial launch of the application hung up completely and I had to restart the phone to get it going again. Clearly a) a labour of love and b) still relatively immature, you can buy Erudite Book Reader for £1.50 here in the Nokia Store. It may not be elegance personified, but it does give you full, synced, function-rich Amazon Kindle ebook reading on Symbian - and that's something I didn't think would happen within Symbian's lifetime.

Source / Credit: Nokia Store