Cool thoughts about E-books on the iPod Touch/iPhone

Now that OS 2.0 for the iPhone/iPod Touch is available, I’ve gotten to see my books on the Touch. I love it. It’s really cool, the interface works great, and I’m looking forward to getting more stuff out there.

Michael Zapp, who created the Legends interface, said he’s been getting a lot of mail about how folks can get their own documents on the iPhone/Touch. He pointed out that there is one simple way to get a PDF or Doc file onto the devices so you can read it.

E-mail it to yourself!

I did that with a PDF of a novel and it actually works really easily. It’s a quick way of getting a document onto the device. I can see doing that with a story for a reading. Last year at Dragoncon I read from a Palm PDA, having massaged a story and rolled it into the handheld. This year I’ll just do it with the Touch.

E-reader does have a reader that goes on the Touch. If you download it you get two free novels: Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. I’ve used E-reader on my Palm for years. The interface here is pretty good, and if you’ve purchased books through E-reader and Fictionwise.com, you’ll be able to pull them onto your iPhone/Touch.

There, to me, is the rub, however. In the past I’ve gone to The Gutenberg Project and snagged public domain works, like the Tarzan book, converted it into the E-reader format, and loaded it onto my Palm. It was really easy to do. I have plenty of books that I’ve done the conversion for. I’d love to have them on my Touch, but there’s no way to put them on there. Even if you have an account with Ereader.com, you can’t upload anything to your bookshelf. The true joy of E-reader was that you could put your own books into the device, but that’s not happening here.

The other ebook reader for the Touch is selling public domain books (taken from Gutenberg) for .99 cents. I’ve not checked it out because I’m not spending a buck on something I can get from Gutenberg for free, turn into a PDF in 5 seconds, and email to myself to read for free. 🙂

Stanza is interesting software. It lets you take any text file and translate it into a variety of formats—including the e-reader format. Earlier last week they did advertise an app that would make them the “first” to have books on the iPhone/Touch; but it didn’t make it into the app store, and I can’t find that page on their site now. What was fascinating is that they were talking about a delivery system that would use wifi to move books from your computer to your Touch. That will be cool if it comes to pass.

It’s really cool watching the dawn of a new era. We live in fantastic times.