Amazon has announced the availability of the Mac version of its Kindle for desktop application, widening the audience of the Kindle store even further.

Releasing on as many platforms as possible is suiting Amazon very well indeed...

Naturally, Amazon is pleased with the move, which brings access to the company’s vastly successful Kindle digital bookshop to just about every major platform going, and announcing that it hopes to make the Kindle shop available to those who pick up the iPad in the not too distant future. Of course, that’s barring any backlash from Apple, which has, in the past, raised issues with apps that “duplicate the functionality of the device” with the iPhone, something that could rear its head again with the iPads iBooks app.

In the meantime, Amazon is talking up the various features that the Kindle application for Mac users shares with the various other Kindle, including a connection to Amazon’s vaguely scary Whispersync, which automatically saves and synchs bookmarks and the most recent pages read across multiple devices, which is always nice.

If nothing else, the timely release of Kindle for Mac before the release of Apple’s iPad means that Amazon could well benefit thanks to the impressive cross-device functionality that we already have a concrete idea of. By contrast, we’re still very much in the dark about Apple’s upcoming iBooks service, to so great an extent that we don’t even really know if iBooks will be made available outside the US.

While it seems as though it’d be perfectly sensible to think that Apple would release iBooks to those of us outside the US, it would seem equally reasonable to expect TV series via iTunes outside the US…

You can check out Amazon’s Kindle for Mac release by clicking here.