Most Important Post 2: Stanza on iPhone, iPod Touch and PC

iPhone iTunes Store
Image by parislemon via Flickr

Since I do not have an iPhone or a Mac, I’ve been rather late in discovering the explosion in e-Books for reading via iPhone or iPod Touch.  Over the past year, several e-Book applications for iPhone have appeared.  The leading one is Stanza by LexCycle, which has been selected Top Free Application for iPhone of 2008.  The developer claims already over one million users of the application.  That’s a LOT OF READERS.  Some tech writers are even predicting that more people will read e-Books on their cellphone than on a Kindle.  You can watch a demo video HERE.  this iPhone app is tightly tied to the iTunes Store, where e-Books is said to be the fastest growing segment in downloads and sales.

LexCycle now offers a beta-version of Stanza for the PC [there's a Mac Desktop version as well].  While still rough at the edges, this application is pretty slick.  Most notable to me is its ability to handle e-Books and documents from multiple formats, including PDF, HTML, Microsoft Word, Rich Text Format as well as unprotected Kindle and Mobipocket e-Books, Palm doc and Open E-Bookformats.  This breaking-down of proprietary e-Book formats is a critical part of the new advances for e-Books.  Most agree that reading e-Books on a desktop will never be the preferable platform, but it is part of the emerging publishing platform.

The desktop version can also tie in to the iPhone app to facilitate reading anywhere.  LexCyle also claims that “Stanza Desktop can also export to MobiPocket, enabling you to use the popular MobiPocket Reader to read your exported book on your Blackberry, PocketPC, Palm OS, Nokia Series 60, Sony Ericsson UIQ, and many other mobile devices.”

What does this mean for writers?  Now there are several viable platforms for one’s work, including Print-on-Demand, e-Book Readers such as the Kindle and Sony Readers and even on cellphone readers.

In my next post, I’ll look at a couple of additional developments that many expect in the next year.

ANOTHER IPHONE E-BOOK READER:

Chris Pirillo recently offered a video demo of Classics, an e-Book Reader for the iPhone with a nifty page-turning feature.  You can view the demo for the nex6 day or two from the Video panel in the sidebar.  Or you can go to my VIDEO FOR WRITERS collection at VodPod — just scroll down til you reach it.  The application and lots of books are available at Apple’s iTunes store.

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