Amazon’s Kindle iOS app adds Goodreads and Kindle Unlimited bookstore

Amazon today rolled out a pretty substantial update for its Kindle iOS app as it prepares for an influx of new readers this holiday season. First, the company has added full Goodreads integration, allowing users of the service — which Amazon bought last year — to keep friends updated as they progress through a book and share quotes and book snippets.

iPad owners now have access to a new Kindle Book Browser. Amazon still isn’t willing to sell individual books through iOS and hand Apple a cut of its sales, but this latest feature is a step in the right direction. It allows Kindle Unlimited subscribers to download and read books immediately without needing to leave the app or hop into a web browser. If you’re not a Kindle Unlimited customer, you can still use the browser to quickly access book details, a story synopsis, and reader reviews.

And if you’re (somehow) new to the Kindle ecosystem, Amazon will now automatically offer up personalized book sample suggestions based on the genres you like and other books you’re interested in reading. For existing customers with big ebook libraries, this new “welcome experience” may not be very useful, but it’ll certainly prove helpful to new Kindle customers that Amazon picks up over the holidays. Rounding out today’s Kindle update is Audible Progressive Play, which lets audiobook listeners start playing back a book as it downloads instead of waiting for the whole transfer to complete.