iPhone as eReader

Your iPhone is an eReader! It can read eBooks: ordinary books published in downloadable, digital form. All you need is the right iPhone eReader app for the books you want to read.

I have four eReader apps so far. Before talking about them individually, I'd like to mention that all these apps present eBooks with text that is formatted for easy reading on a handheld device. That means that you are not looking at tiny reproductions of the pages in the printed version of the book. Instead, the text is "re-flowed." You see artificial "pages" with however much text can fit on the iPhone screen, no more, no less.

Most of the apps give you the option to choose what font the text is in, how big the text is, how wide the margins are, how far apart the lines of text are, and so forth. (The Kindle for iPhone app is the sole exception; it gives you some formatting control, but it's locked into a single font.)

Now for the four apps:

Kindle for iPhone, free at the iTunes App Store, is the top name in the iPhone eReader app field. Kindle is the name of a handheld device that Amazon.com sells for $299. If you owned one, you could buy any of the over 350,000 books Amazon sells in eBook form, including virtually all of the current New York Times bestsellers, typically for a price of $9.99 or less.

If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch along with the Kindle for iPhone app, you don't need a standalone Kindle device. You can download and read the same eBooks the Kindle eReader can, right on your iPhone.

Kindle eBooks are in a format that won't work with any device other than a standalone Kindle or a handheld device such as an iPhone/iPod touch that has the Kindle for iPhone app. There are, in addition to the Kindle eBook format, other eBook formats that boast hundreds of thousands of books. For those, I have three other iPhone apps.


Stanza is another free eBook reader app. It reads mainly free books — you don't have to pay for them — from a variety of sources. You can find and download these books by going into the Online Catalog in the Stanza app itself.

Also in the Stanza Online Catalog are links to vendors of books that do cost actual money. Right now one of the most popular eBooks-with-a-price is Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, which you can get for $9.95 by pointing the Stanza Online Catalog to BooksOnBoard. Using eReader (see below), I recently bought another version of the same book for $9.99. (I have seen the hardcover edition — list price $29.95 — on sale at a bricks-and-mortar Barnes & Noble for 40% off, at $17.97. You can buy the hardcover edition online at Amazon right this minute for $16.17. An eBook price of under $10 is a pretty good deal.)

The maker of the Stanza app is LexCycle. LexCycle is owned by ... guess who ... Amazon, makers of Kindle!

Stanza supports a wide range of eBook formats. If you click on this link, you can get a quick look at many of the main eBook formats that are in existence. Stanza supports most of them, but not all. The catch is — and this is a very important catch — Stanza does not support any format (other than the so-called eReader format; see below) when there is DRM protection involved. And it supports eReader DRM protection only on the iPhone/iPod touch, not in its desktop version.

What is DRM protection? DRM stands for "digital rights management," tech talk for copy protection. If you buy a Kindle eBook from Amazon, for instance, it will typically (but not always) be DRM-protected, which means you can't copy it to your spouse's iPhone. DRM-protected eBooks are usually encrypted, such that you have to enter a code such a a username/password combination to make them readable.

So there are two general types of eBooks. Most or all recently published eBooks have legal copyright protection, just as do the print editions. Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol is one of these. These copyrighted eBooks accordingly cost you money to buy and are DRM-protected and encrypted.

The other type of eBook is free of charge and not DRM-protected. Classic books that are old enough to no longer be copyright protected are the stars of this category. Their eBook versions typically have no DRM protection. Often they are in the ePub format, an open format that Stanza and some other iPhone e-Reader apps (but not Kindle for iPhone as far as I know) can use. (An "open" format is one that is not proprietary and can be used by anyone who wants to. The Kindle format is, on the other hand, proprietary and cannot be used by eBook sources not licensed by Amazon.)


eReader from FictionWise is a free app for iPhone that reads mainly eBooks that FictionWise itself and eReader.com sell.

This part of the discussion gets confusing, so bear with me: eReader.com is the name of a website that sells eBooks that are in the eReader format and are usable by the eReader iPhone app. FictionWise.com is the name of a website that likewise sells eBooks in eReader format usable by the eReader app.

Often, these two sources sell exactly the same eBooks. Both companies are owned by Barnes & Noble ... the bricks-and-mortar bookstore chain whose online store is in competition with Amazon.com, makers of Kindle. As endorsed in July 2009 by B&N, the eReader format is designed to allow DRM protection, putting it in direct competition with Amazon's Kindle format. The free B&N eReader app for iPhone (see below) uses the same DRM-protected format, but it makes you buy eBooks directly from the B&N website, not from FictionWise.com or eReader.com.

The eReader format is discussed in the Wikipedia article Comparison of e-book formats (scroll about halfway down, or else click here). It is also called the Palm Digital Media format, since it was originally for PalmOS, the operating system used on Palm handhelds.

Files in the Palm Digital Media (or eReader) format have the .pdb extension (though when you are using an iPhone app to access them, you can't see the files as such, much less their filenames and extensions). The .pdb extension derives from the initials of "Palm Data Base." These files, when in an open version of the format that is not DRM-protected, are often referred to also as "Palm Doc" files.

To add to the confusion, the term eReader is being used as a generic term for any handheld device that reads eBooks. By extension, any cellphone, smartphone, or other mobile device that can (with the proper app) read eBooks is an eReader.

Furthermore, there is yet another eReader app for iPhone ...


The free B&N eReader app is very much like the eReader app I just discussed, except that it is hot-wired directly to the Barnes & Noble website. When you shop for books in the B&N eReader app, the app automatically opens that website in the iPhone's Safari browser. You then use the browser to buy any eBook you want and add it to the eBook library that is maintained for you at the website. The eBook will automatically sync to your iPhone as soon as you return to the B&N eReader app on the iPhone.

The same B&N eReader app exists for the Blackberry as well as for Windows and Macintosh computers, so you can download and read any e-Book that you have in your Barnes & Noble e-Book library on any of these platforms.

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More information on iPhone e-Reader apps:

• First Impressions of Kindle on iPhone comes from Walter S. Mossberg, author of the weekly Personal Technology column in The Wall Street Journal.
• Comparing Kindle 2 with Kindle's iPhone app comes from Nicole Lee, an associate editor at CNET.
• Kindle is not the best iPhone e-reader comes from tech columnist Don Reisinger and appears at CNET. It discusses Stanza and eReader,in addition to Kindle for iPhone.
• CNET's review of Kindle for iPhone contains a link with which to download it from the iTunes Store.
• CNET's review of Stanza also contains a link with which to download it from the iTunes Store.
• CNET's description (not a review) of eReader for iPhone likewise contains a link with which to download it from the iTunes Store.
• The LexCycle website has more information about Stanza.
  

More information about obtaining eBooks:

• Kindle Store at Amazon.com.
• Browse eBooks at Barnes & Noble online.
• FictionWise's home page is its online entry point for locating eBooks.
• Likewise, the home page at eReader.com is its online entry point for locating eBooks.
• You can see what eBooks are offered by BooksOnBoard by clicking here.
  
• For free eBooks, visit the Project Gutenberg website. Project Gutenberg is an ongoing effort to make scads of older or more obscure books available in eBook form. Many, but not all, are free. The Project Gutenberg online catalog is here. Project Gutenberg offers eBooks in various formats, with the Stanza iPhone app being able to directly access, download, and read those that are in the open ePub format.
  

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A big question is: if you have a choice, which format of eBook is best?

One important factor is price. It looks as if there is sometimes a price discrepancy between Kindle eBooks and eBooks in other formats. The Kindle edition of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, is only $8.40, while FictionWise and eReader.com list it at $14.00! Barnes & Noble online shows it at $9.99. $14.00 is apparently the "official" list price for the digital edition of the book, while $8.40 and $9.99 represent different levels of discount.

But considerations other than price dominate my own thinking. I prefer an eBook that I can read on my iMac, my MacBook Pro, or my iPhone. Kindle does not have a desktop version of its reader, so Kindle eBooks are not flexible enough to suit me. There are, however, desktop versions of Stanza (click here), of eReader (click here), and of B&N eReader (click here). Not only are there desktop versions of these three readers that work on the Mac, there are versions for Windows platforms as well. (And there are versions for other handhelds, not just the iPhone/iPod Touch.)

It is the combination of Stanza for the Desktop with Stanza for the iPhone that is the key here. Working together, the two can download and use eReader-format eBooks that would otherwise need to use the eReader for iPhone app or the B&N eReader for iPhone app!

The eReader format, remember, is the one that uses the .pdb filename extension (see above for more). The eBooks you buy at Barnes & Noble, FictionWise, eReader.com, and numerous other places typically are (or at least they can be) in this ubiquitous .pdb format. Typically, but not always, these .pdb eBooks are DRM-protected and require you to enter the right identifying information before you can read them. Often, that is, you have to supply the exact name (yours, specifically) and card number you used in specifying the credit card that you used to buy the eBook.

But DRM-protected .pdb-format eBooks bought at Barnes & Noble, FictionWise, eReader.com, etc., might just as well be read in the eReader for iPhone app or the B&N eReader app for iPhone ... you don't need Stanza on the iPhone for them. Where Stanza comes in handy is with .pdb-format eBooks that you get elsewhere.

For example, I got a free copy of Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, at VirtualImprint.com. It came as three separate eBook copies in three separate formats, only one of which was in the .pdb format. I downloaded all three copies to my desktop. I then checked to make sure that the desktop version of eReader could read the .pdb copy ... and it could.

Notice that such .pdb eBooks can't be read by Stanza Desktop ... but never mind. Stanza for the Desktop will download them to the Stanza for iPhone app, where they can be unlocked and read.

The procedure for doing this can be found here. I'll repeat the key points, elaborating them as necessary:

The dedicated Stanza iPhone application, which can be downloaded onto the iPhone via the Apple App Store [click here], can download eBooks from your computer using Stanza Desktop. The Stanza Desktop application is currently available for Apple Macintosh and Windows computers from http://download.lexcycle.com. To download books:

1. Launch Stanza Desktop.
2. In Stanza Desktop, go to File->Open [File->Open File... on a Mac], and open a book or document that is in one of Stanza's supported formats. Note: The text of eReader [.pdb] books will not be displayed, but you can still use this interface to share books with Stanza iPhone. [Instead of seeing the text of a .pdb eBook, you will see "Stanza Desktop cannot read this eReader book. However, you can share this book with Stanza iPhone/iPod Touch from Stanza Desktop."]
3. In Stanza Desktop, go to the "Tools" menu, and ensure that the "Enable Sharing" menu item is checked.
4. Ensure that your iPhone is connected to the same wireless [WiFi] network that your PC [or Mac] is on.
5. Launch Stanza on your iPhone.
6. From the top-level library menu in Stanza on the iPhone, select "Shared Books". You should see your computer name. Select it.
7. Stanza Desktop will then notify you that your iPhone is attempting to connect to your shared library, and request your permission to allow the connection. [I chose "Always Allow" the first time I used this procedure; subsequent usages did not request permission again.]
8. Once you have granted permission, Stanza iPhone will display a list of books that are open in Stanza Desktop.
9. Tap on a book to download it to Stanza on your iPhone. It will then appear in Titles and Recent Downloads. [For DRM-protected .pdb eBooks, the download will not take place until the proper identifying information, such as the name and credit card number used to purchase the eBook, is entered into Stanza on the iPhone. Once they are entered, the download proceeds. The eBook that has been downloaded to Stanza on the iPhone is permanently unlocked there, so you won't have to enter the identifying information again. You just use it in the same way you use any other eBook in Stanza on the iPhone.]
   

Though this may seem like a welter of confusing detail, it turns out to be a pretty easy thing to do ... once you've done it two or three times, at least. The point of the whole exercise is that you can then read the same .pdb-format eBooks in Stanza on the iPhone that you can in eReader (or B&N eReader) on your computer. Nice!