"One of our top iPhone pet peeves has been that you couldn’t use it as an eBook reader, something that seems ideal given its sprawling screen. It made us long for the days of the PalmPilot, where we’d read free novels from Project Gutenberg during our subway commutes. Well this is one more barrier to buying an iPhone that’s fallen, thanks to Fictionwise’s eReader software. The free download includes two classics that you should read if you haven’t—Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans." – PC Magazine.
Coming eReader attractions: See more thoughts from Fictionwise co-owner Steve Pendergrast on eReader for the iPhone. "In the coming weeks," he says in part, "we will have a cleanup release that will make selected interface refinements as well as make it possible to upload personal content and content bought at other retailers or downloaded from free places like Manybooks that support ereader format, followed by a couple more releases that will start filling in some of the advanced features that didn’t make it into the first release."
Great! Now how about one that supports ePub!
I’m glad to hear they’ll allow other sites to provide books in eReader format — it looks like a great app!
Yoda and Matt:
Y:
Hear, hear, Yoda!
eReader will help for now, but e-book standards are the real solution in the end.
I think that an ePub-capable eReader app—which could also read the proprietary format, to ease the transition—would be wonderful.
Fictionwise has been rather progressive on the DRM issue in the past and also supported the OpenReader standards initiative. So you never know.
But for now? Understandably Fictionwise’s first priority is to adapt the current software for a popular platform like the iPhone.
People who in the past would have gotten a PDA—typical Fictionwise customers—are in many cases buying iPhones.
M:
Keep us posted on the eReader front, if you learn something before we do. Glad to see the Pendergrasts thinking of Manybooks.net!
Thanks,
David
Yeah, what he said: ePub! Then at least I’d have a format I could put my own private stuff in without worrying about file obsolescence.