MacLife.com has an article entitled “Transform Your iPod touch Into A Makeshift Kindle” which, while riddled with blatant errors or omissions (and let’s not even go into the idea that, to be a useful e-book reader, an iPod must be “transformed” into a “makeshift Kindle”), does introduce a few apps that are new to me.
The biggest error comes when the article says that Stanza “doesn’t support files protected by DRM (digital rights management), so most commercial e-book stores are useless to the iPhone, including Amazon’s Kindle Store.”
The article was published on November 27th, well before Stanza’s deal with eReader was announced, so they can be forgiven for not knowing about that—but not knowing about the eReader app itself, which belongs to the biggest name in e-books there is apart from Amazon? Fictionwise.com and eReader.com are certainly not “useless to the iPhone,” and for many people, those are the only “commercial e-book stores” they will need.
And the article does not mention eReader, Bookshelf, iSilo, or any of the other e-book reading options for iPhone. Apart from Stanza, it covers Air Sharing, Instapaper, Netnews Wire, WriteRoom…and Flashlight.
Flashlight?
Thanks (really!) to Mary E. Tyler from The E-Book Community mailing list for calling my attention to this.
I think leaving out Bookshelf is probably the biggest omission because Bookshelf can ready mobipocket files without DRM and we all know how easy it is to go from a mobipocket file with DRM to one without. I put the same books on my Kindle on my iPod touch because I don’t always have my Kindle on me but I usually have my iPod touch. This makes it easy to pick up whatever book I’m currently reading no matter where I am.