For several weeks now I have been enjoying a number of books on Apple’s iPhone 3G, thanks to two free eBook players offered in the iTunes Apps Store; Stanza, which can download thousands of free titles from Feedbooks as well as transfer books wirelessly from your Mac, and eReader which offers books for sale from an online store and more recently with a new update, can download titles from any website you direct it to. Both allow you to flip pages with your fingertips as well as read pages in landscape view and both allow you to manipulate text sizes, font styles, and even page colours. Both companies are feverishly working to add new features to their players and based on the resounding reception their software has received from users so far, it’s clear that the iPhone and iPod Touch are set to become dominant eBook devices going forward.

The iPhone 3G and iPod Touch As eBook Devices

With a 3.5” screen, the iPhone 3G is in no danger of replacing standalone eBook devices such as the Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader. It simply can’t compete in comfort. Not to say that reading pages off of an iPhone is difficult, far from it, it’s as acceptable as reading e-mails or web pages, but that when given the choice, the large-sized screen, electronic ink display, and book-like form factor of the bigger devices make them the more immersive and enjoyable experiences. When you wish to curl up with a good book in a large chair by the fireplace or from the comfort of your bed at the end of the day, the Sony Reader is the best way to go.

There are, however, a number of advantages to Apple’s devices that give them an edge. They have back-lit, colour screens, touch controls, and not only can they download new titles directly from the internet, but can store thousands, not just hundreds, of books. Apple’s iTunes Apps Store can offer eBook software written by anyone on the planet, and so is not limited to file formats, functionality, or online stores. If Sony or Amazon wish to sell their eBooks to iPhone and iPod Touch owners, they merely have to create Apps to do so, and if what many software developers are saying is true, it’s not that difficult of a task.

Software developers will be able to do the same tricks with eBooks as they are with other forms of digital content and data. It won’t surprise me if new Apps arrive that allow you to look up locations from the book you’re reading on Google Maps or use the GPS functionality to find others in your area also reading books from the same genre or category. Chapters/Indigo would be wise to connect their online book lovers community to the iPhone in the same way that Facebook and MySpace have. Books lacking in illustrations could use photo-sharing communities such as Flickr to find suitable images and biographies could be tied to online news networks to grab news stories tied to their subject matter. There is a world of potential that Apple’s devices can explore that standalone eBook readers are not yet capable of following into.

By far the most compelling advantage is convenience. Because it is a phone, I carry my iPhone 3G everywhere I go and so it is always with me and the key to making use of the downtime moments that hit me each week. When I’m waiting for a press conference or a meeting to begin, or passing time in a Green Room, waiting to be called on-stage, I can use the iPhone to catch up on my reading. I’ll never find myself sitting in an empty waiting room, wishing I had brought a book with me. The Kindle and Sony Reader are also portable, but easy to leave behind when priorities demand.

Stanza

Created by LexCycle, Stanza smoothly displays books with minimal loading times, offers quick transitions between portrait and landscape views, and customizable settings both within the books and the software itself, as well as deeper options added within the iPhone/iPod Touch’s own device settings menu. You turn pages with a tap or swipe of the finger and can use hidden controls to change the font size, search the book by keyword, skip directly to specific chapters, and even use a slider bar to quickly skim through pages.

Developers LexCycle have been remarkably fast in taking requests sent to them by users and adding them as proper features through software updates. Since launch they have added the ability to edit book titles, set the program to instantly open the last page of the last book you were reading, and even customize what areas of the screen you wish to tap in order to turn a page.

Stanza has an excellent system of organizing your books by title, author, latest read, recently downloaded, and even gives you the option to create your own categories to organize your books the way you want to.

In the main device settings menu, you’ll find options to change page turning effects and duration, font types and size as well as colour schemes for both the page background and text. You can adjust the text alignment and use slider bars to change both the margin and line spacing.

LexCycle isn’t tied to any online retailer at the moment, instead they offer a direct connection to Feedbooks, an online catalog offering thousands of public domain books including titles both new, classic, and old, along with sections offering a gathering of international classics and religious texts which at this time only includes the King James Bible. The Feedbooks service is fantastic, all of the titles are formatted for Stanza and play very well and the selection of titles, which is expanded routinely, is wide and includes books in French and Spanish as well as English.

Stanza’s weakness right now is in adding books from other sources. To do so requires the use of the desktop version of Stanza which is very primitive and currently only available for Macs (a windows version is in the works). It is such a bare bones piece of software that I didn’t even notice I had the application open on my MacBook Pro the first time I used it. It has the ability to display eBooks on your computer screen, although without the sophistication of the iPhone version, but its real use is as a utility for easily converting eBook formats from one into the other. This it does quickly easily and smoothly.

In this way you can take an eBook or document from any source (well, any DRM-Free source) and convert it over and transfer it to your iPhone. Once you turn on the file-sharing option on your Mac and open an eBook on your computer, Stanza on your iPhone can automatically detect, connect, and download the eBook file to your iPhone or iPod Touch. It’s primitive, but it works. Currently in Beta, the software is free, but there are plans to charge $15 when they reach a final version.

Stanza is currently my favorite program for displaying eBooks. The challenge facing developers LexCycle will be in coming up with a better system for adding or even buying new titles.

eReader

Created by Fictionwise, eReader connects directly to the eReader.com online store and can display books available in the proprietary eReader format. Unfortunately the loading times are a bit long, and rather annoying, it has to reload the book each time you change your iPhone or iPod Touch from portrait to landscape view. Pages are displayed cleanly and flip with a light tap or swipe of the finger.

You can access an in-book toolbar to quickly skip to specific chapters or search by keyword from specified points in the book. You can choose a font type as well as size (small, medium, large, and huge), and can switch between full and regular justification. There’s also the option to polarize the screen, switching to white text against a black screen.

Books purchased from the eBooks store can range in price from $6 to $23, are very polished and often include illustrations beyond the front cover. A virtual bookshelf automatically organizes your eBooks by title, author, and date.

To add your own documents, you’ll need to convert your files into the eReader format on your Windows or Mac computer using eReader Studio, a software program sold through eReader’s online store for a surprisingly high fee of $30 US. Once converted, you can upload the files to your eReader.com or Fictionwise.com account and then download them onto your iPhone or iPod Touch through their online server.

With a recent update to the eReader App, fictionwise has added a powerful new function. You can now type in an url to any website or file directory containing books in eReader format and download them onto your iPhone or iPod Touch. This includes your own website or online server.

It’s a feature that works extremely well with ManyBooks.net, which has even launched an iPhone-friendly version of their directory (mnybks.net) to make the process easier. You’ll find over 21,000 free titles, each categorized with full descriptions and book covers, all easy to download without the use of a computer, merely choose the eReader format from the selection list and click on download with your finger, and it’s added to the eReader bookshelf automatically.

Fictionwise is currently the only company to offer a complete eBook solution for the iPhone and iPod Touch, offering a free eBook App combined with multiple online retail stores for new books along with several options for downloading free public domain titles. Their challenge will be in improving the quality of their eReader App to match that of competitor Stanza and in providing an easier and cheaper way for users to add their own personal documents.

Other eBook Apps

The iTunes Apps Store contains two other eBook solutions at the moment. There’s a series of individual titles from AppEngines, each a self-playing eBook that sells for 99 cents, but are all public domain titles already available for free through the Apps I’ve listed above, and Bookshelf by Zachary Bedell which is selling in the Education section for $10.

Bookshelf isn’t tied to an existing eBook provider, but rather is designed more as an application for those who already have a large, existing library of DRM-Free eBooks and are looking for a slick way to transfer them over to their portable device. It supports a range of formats; Plucker, PalmDocs, and DRM-Free Mobi files. Bookshelf’s strength is in its extensive display options. There are a number of colour schemes and options for formatting text. Documents can be displayed as long continuous pages with the option to have them autoscroll. To help you transfer your eBook library over from your desktop computer, Bedell offers a free program through his website called ShelfServe that allows you to use your Wi-Fi connection to share your supported files between desktop and portable device. Created for Mac users, ShelfServe can also work for Windows users with Bonjour, although results may not be ideal.

Bookshelf exists more as a utility reader for existing eBook owners rather than as a proper eBook solution, which ideally would offer the reader software for free and be tied to an online store.

A Quick Word About Comic Books

With the Multi-Touch Display’s ability to zoom into image files and smoothly slide from section to section, the iPhone and iPod Touch should be ideal devices for reading comic books. Unfortunately the “zoom” function on the Apple’s mobile photo viewer doesn’t retain the image’s resolution very well. Its fine enough for photographs, but text in speech bubbles becomes blurry. Until Apple improves this feature on their devices, comic book fans will have to wait for a specific App to fill the need.

ClickWheel is currently the closest offering. A free App, ClickWheel can display iComic and CBR files, but is currently limited to only those files offered and sold through their own clickwheel service, which does not yet support direct purchases to your mobile device. Instead you have to purchase the comics for your home computer to unlock them and then use your account to download them to your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Titles offered will be obscure to most and range from UK favorites AD 2000 and Judge Dredd to Abby’s Agency and Silent Kimberly. As it exists, ClickWheel is slow and sluggish, once you zoom into a comic strip, it’s difficult to zoom back out and as it exists isn’t worth installing.

Recommended Reading

E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops is available as a free download both for Stanza via Feedbooks and for eReader through Manybooks.

If you are a fan of the film “Wall-E” or like myself spend far too much time living on the internet, I highly recommend you read the short novella “The Machine Stops” by E. M Forster. Best known as the author of “A Room With A View”, Forster here reveals himself as a science fiction writer with as much prescient imagination as H. G. Wells or George Orwell, it’s just taken the arrival of the Digital Information Age to reveal it. Published in 1909, Forster’s story delivers a vision of the future where society is divided up into individual cells, communicating with each other through interactive channels, chatting and presenting ideas through forums devoted to niche subjects. So much so that everyone becomes overweight and better attuned with the world as it is presented by the information technology they comfort themselves with rather than as it really exists outside their homes. Pixar fans will quickly recognize the tale as one of many that helped inspire the themes of “Wall-E”.

Bound to inspire some rather uncomfortable, but healthy, self-reflection, might I suggest that you read it outside, perhaps at the base of a large, supportive tree where you can catch the green of grass when you look past the touchscreen in your hands?