How To Get the iPhone Kindle App Outside the U.S.

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Amazon has still not made the “Kindle for iPhone” application available for its overseas customers. The only place to find it is in the US app store. Since I used my iPod Touch almost exclusively to read books for the past year, this is pretty annoying. Perhaps there is a workaround?

It turns out there is. Thanks to the iTunes Store option to choose “none” as a payment method, you can sign up for a US iTunes account with nothing more than an e-mail address (not the one you normally use), a real address and a cellphone number. Any free applications are then available to download, and best of all, when you hook up your iPhone or iPod Touch the application just syncs.

So does it work? Yes. I launched Kindle for iPhone and input my Amazon login. All my purchased books were there, at exactly the place I had left off on the Kindle itself. And while this is a rather big deal for any foreign Kindle and iPhone owners, this experiment shows that US travelers will have access to Whispersync via their cellphones whilst abroad.

This is limited to the books bought from the Kindle store. But hey, it’s free.

Read more: Gadget Lab.