Friday, September 12, 2008

Demo Of Stanza eBook Reader For iPhone

The originating post at TeleRead: Stanza 1.4 video—complete with display of DRMless Pan Mac ePub books.
Toward Kindle-simple purchases of nonDRMed ePub books

Like the Kindle, the iPhone can download from most locations in the States, plus countries not covered by the K machine. And the Touch does WiFi. Result? The Stanza can solve the problem of, "How do I get e-books into my machine?" Things are pretty easy now for direct downloaders of books from public domain sites like Feedbooks’ and Munsey’s, and they should become still simpler. Now just wait until Lexcycle, Stanza’s developer, does the inevitable and gets serious about capabilities for content-related e-commerce from those places or others.

Enticingly, the demo is showing two nonDRMed ePub titles from the Pan Macmillan store—Perdido Street Station and Stealing Light. Blend in Stanza’s existing capabilities with ways to pay for books on your iPhone or Touch, either through independent retailers, Pan Mac directly or Apple. Then you may see the start of a new eco system for e-books. Same for eReader in time (ideally with ePub capabilities). May Pan Mac jump in! If certain other publishers don’t want to skip anti-piracy precautions entirely, then they might consider social DRM, which still could play on a variety of machines and let you own books for real.

This is what I love about companies who listen to customers and potential customers. I just the other day asked about Stanza and using the Pan Mac DRM-free eBooks and not only got a reply in a TeleRead post, but this video is also a result of that! It clearly shows non-DRMed for-pay Pan Macmillan ePub eBooks being read on an iPhone/iPod Touch:


Stanza desktop is shown via WiFi


Two Pan Mac DRM-free ePub eBooks are shown on the desktop PC


Here one is being downloaded to the iPhone/iPod Touch


It's now stored in the iPhone/iPod Touch


It's been opened ready to read


Tap to begin

And the next bunch of shots show going from page to page:



















This is really exciting. Professionally-formatted ePub eBooks from a major print publisher being read on an iPhone/iPod Touch!

View the video (page bottom) to see how powerful an iPhone/iPod Touch running Stanza can be. It offers more instant reading choices than the abominable Amazon Kindle -- because, just like the Sony Reader, it isn't restricted to a single source for eBooks!

Now just imagine what that would be like on an iPod Touchbook!

See if your favorite writer is available in eBook format at The eBook Test blog.

Previously here:

iPhone eBook Reader Stanza Available
Reference: Stanza eBook Reader For iPhone

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