Page Turned on the eBook?
It has been an exciting couple of weeks for eBooks!
O’Reilly Adopts Bookworm
O’Reilly Publishing has adopted Bookworm, a web site for online eBook reading and storage. Bookworm is built on open software and the open epub standard. Bookworm looks pretty slick!
Once you upload your ebooks, you can transfer them from Bookworm to the Stanza app on your iPhone. Unfortunately, Stanza is still kind of rough around the edges. Paging is little different from Palm-era ebook readers, and pre-formatted text often gets cut off at less than its full width.
Still, my enthusiasm for the epub standard makes me think Bookworm itself has a good chance to succeed, at least to some extent. epub piggybacks on HTML, and consequently has good support for things like tables. There is also support for generating epub content from books expressed in another attractive format, DocBook XSL.
Kindle for iPhone
Then, Amazon released a Kindle App for the iPhone.
Kindle for iPhone seamlessly downloads all your purchased Kindle content and can sync your current page across iPhone and Kindle Wireless Reading Device (”Kindle”).
The App is pretty well done. Paging is accomplished using the cool finger-flit motion familiar from other iPhone apps.
However, unlike Stanza and the Kindle Wireless Reading Device, there’s no integrated search. And the Mobi format underlying Kindle content still lacks support for real tables.
Perhaps most disappointingly, there appears to be no way to load content that was not purchased through Amazon into Kindle for iPhone. Hopefully, this facility will come soon, along with some way to read Kindle content on a Desktop.
Nevertheless, having all my Kindle content available to my iPhone has proven to be convenient. It’s especially useful for reading when your range of motion is limited, like on a crowded train. The iPhone also makes it possible to read in the dark or in extreme cold. The e-ink technology that underlies the Kindle Wireless Reading Device looks great, but it isn’t backlit and the tiny little colored spheres that underly it won’t spin properly at low temperatures.