Kindle for Android receives ability to share book quotes & previews with friends

Amazon announced today new sharing functionality for its Kindle app that’s exclusive to the Android version until later this year. The new functionality provides the ability to share quotes, highlights, and book recommendations with friends over a host of different messaging services, and instant book previews for those who are on the receiving end of these shares.

Amazon is quoted in its press release as saying that the purpose of these new features is to make it simple for people to have conversations around books. “Kindle readers could already share quotes and recommendations with all their friends on Facebook or Twitter, and now they can start a conversation with specific people,” the company says.

The company doesn’t specify every social network and communication method supported – it lists Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, email, and SMS – but the top left image above shows most of the major ones here in the US. I imagine that since the generated quotes, highlights, and book previews live inside a webpage on Amazon’s site and what the company shares to the networks is nothing more than a link to that page, that most networks in your Android share menu that having messaging/posting capability should work fine.

What’s more interesting are the instant book previews. Whereas in the past previewing a book from Amazon on mobile required downloading the preview from Amazon’s store and viewing it inside an app or on one of the company’s devices (there’s a web viewer at read.amazon.com but there’s no button for it on the mobile website product pages), now previews of books will be accessible from inside the webpage of their shared snippets.

“The perfect quote in a book isn’t always the perfect quote for your whole social network. Now it’s easy to share exactly what you want in a Kindle book with exactly who you want,” said Russ Grandinetti, Senior Vice President, Kindle. “Kindle makes it easy to chat about the books you’re reading, whether it’s making a recommendation or sparking a conversation about a quote you loved. And friends who receive the share can instantly start reading a free sample of the book—no sign-up, no sign-in, and no app to install.”

Our updated version of the app doesn’t have the share functionality yet, but the company says it’s rolling out now.