The promise of everyone having their own portable eBook reader to tote around has been bubbling for a long time – Wikipedia points to the late 1990s.  There have been many promising product releases, the latest being Amazon’s Kindle.  The Kindle and its predecessors have attracted ever increasing publicity and consequentially people prepared to invest their hard earned cash to get one.  Nevertheless none of them can really be considered as getting beyond the early adaptor stage.

As reported by Forbes.com, a free to download software add-on for a mobile phone is already outstripping the potential of Amazon’s flagship eBook Reader.  Stanza from Lexcycle is freely downloadable from the Apple App Store:

Read electronic books on your iPhone and iPod Touch! With a reading interface that is unprecedented in its clarity and ease of use, Stanza is bringing the eBook revolution to your pocket. Store and categorise hundreds of books in the organizer, choose from thousands of free books available in the Lexcycle Online Library, and transfer books you share from your computer using Stanxa Desktop.  Your entire summer reading, your class syllabus for the whole year, or all the reference material you will ever need: all at your fingertips. Literally.

As they report there have been more than 395,000 downloads from the App Store and continues to be installed at a rate of about 5,000 copies a day.  Comparing this with Citigroup’s estimate of that there will be around 380,000 Kindle sales in 2008, places this in perspective.

OK the iPhone screen is small compared with some dedicated book readers, but with the iPhone screen quality and the natural feeling of the iPhone user interface, this looks like it could fit in to the ‘good enough’ category of book reader applications.  Add to that that, it being on your phone so you are likely to mostly have it with you and it is free so ‘why not give it a try’.  I think there may well be the possibility of a break through success on the cards here.

Take a look at the video from the Lexcycle people [Quicktime][Flash], it’s really quite impressive.

I also note the following from their site:

Stanza is also the first program that has a built-in export feature especially for the Amazon Kindle. Your PDFs, Word documents, and other eBooks can all be exported to the Kindle’s native format and copied over to the device using a USB cable. Get a paper-quality reading experience for all your electronic documents with this innovative new device!

Last, but not least, Stanza has an experimental new feature that allows you to export your books to MP3 audiobooks. Your entire audiobook can then be added to iTunes and synchronized with your iPod or other digital music player. This technology enables the blind and visually impaired to enjoy a wealth of electronic documents.

I wonder how long before it will import Kindle format?  At the rate of adoption and Amazon’s business model being based on selling the content, not necessarily the method of consuming it, they may already be helping Lexcycle do it – or there again as a company founded by an act of datsusara, somebody’s change of career could well end up with them working for Amazon.

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