To get the latest, free version of the app, make sure you go to the link on the Amazon web site, not the Apple or Windows App Store as the App Store versions are quite old. All this has changed with the latest versions of the apps, available from Amazon, which can easily read out text from speech-enabled books using your computer's default voice. Text to speech has been available for some Kindle book readers for a number of years, but if you wanted to add this feature to the Kindle apps for a Windows or Mac computer, this involved an incredible amount of faffing about. It’s free, open-source software that you can extend further (if you have the skills) by helping to develop it directly, or by creating additional plugins for others to use.Posted by Allan Wilson on the 15th February, 2017 Like the Kindle desktop app, it allows you to read your eBooks, share your collection with others, sync it across multiple devices, and more.

The most popular of those is Calibre, the desktop eBook reader available for Windows, Linux, and macOS devices.

If you want to escape the Amazon ecosystem, then alternatives do exist for desktop users. Alternatives To The Kindle Desktop Reader You can also share the same collection, keep your saved position and sync it across your devices, and do the same with any book annotations you make across all Kindle products. For instance, many of the accessibility features are common across all Kindle products, although the Kindle devices lack some of the more advanced features like text-to-speech. Otherwise, there really isn’t a huge amount of difference between the Kindle desktop app, Kindle mobile apps, or Kindle devices themselves. mobi eBook files using the Kindle app natively with no additional fuss. This leads to another direct advantage that the Kindle desktop app over other Kindle products. The larger screens on desktop PCs and laptops allow you to view much more text at once, which could be useful for those studying books and those who want to catch up on reading from their PC.Īmazon wants you to buy its books through its own store and, while it isn’t impossible to read non-Amazon eBooks on Kindle devices, it isn’t the easiest process-unless you’re using the Kindle desktop app. While the Kindle desktop app isn’t designed to be portable, it does have one distinct advantage over Kindle mobile apps-size.

You can also use a built-in text-to-speech mode to create auto-generated audiobooks you can listen to while you work, as well as annotate your books directly-perfect for students or academics. It has many of the features you’d expect to see from an eBook reader, including many seen on Kindle devices, offering the ability to change font and font sizes, alter page widths for better reading, as well as switch to an accessible viewing color mode.

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