Hmm… iphonebrowser can in fact access non-jailbroken iphones, but you are limited to some subset of directories. i suppose it is worth a try.

One thing I would like to see is for ebook software developers to use the “sandbox” directories for ebook storage. That way, there are a number of apple sanctioned programs that would let you easily transfer files over through wifi or through usb. I hated having to download my library to stanza, to ereader, to bookshelf, etc. every time my ipod goes haywire.

If you do feel adventurous, try quickpwn. Just a warning: iphones are not the same as the ipod touch. It was rather straightforward to free my first generation touch (firmware 2.1.2). Your mileage may vary.

I’m not sure what Man Ching Cheung means by “There’s no scrolling,” since the butter-smooth scrolling is the one feature (possibly the only one, honestly) where Bookshelf excels. eReader’s Autoscroll function is atrociously jerky and, frankly, unusable.

That said, I’ve read about six whole novel-length books on my iPod Touch and I don’t have any complaints.

In fact, it’s better for reading in bed, there’s no spine to get in the way when holding the ‘book’ sideways.

I think the people that make these statements never did things like read books under the covers at night with a dim flashlight. They aren’t TRUE readers!

I have read hundreds of ebooks (mainstream, bought from Fictionwise and public domain books) since the first Palm Pilots came out. Take it as another datum: I prefer the pure black on white available on the LCD displays. Kindle/sony ereader reminds me too much of the black-on-green monochrome of the PalmPilots, which I moved away from every chance I got. So that’s where I’m coming from. I can see how people who might not have experience with reading on PalmPilots may come to prefer eInk over LCD screens.

You should try eReader, Stanza, or Bookshelf. The features for any of these outclass Kindle. That was true even at the version 1.0 of these readers; they all had more features than Kindle 1.0 (although I am sure Kindle for iPhone will improve.)

However, all of the readers have defects. I will boil down the most relevant features from each reader as follows:

eReader has too few fonts enabled, but it has annotations, bookmarking, and word definition lookup (if you have a dictionary on the iPhone.) However, it’s annoying how I would have to manually take off the annotations files and if I want to see them on my laptop. There’s no syncing of bookmarks to the desktop program. There is a teleprompter scrolling mode, but it isn’t as smooth as on my Windows Mobile and PalmOS devices.

Stanza: has everything eReader has, except for the annotation system. Can’t follow links. More fonts, a pretty interface. I also like the way the page turn looks. It has the prettiest library interface (supports coverflow). It’s nice how there are so many online libraries for it, including some free books from Random House (although I think you can get those books from elsewhere, for free, as well.)

Bookshelf: can’t follow links well enough to make it worth my while. I don’t like the “chunking” method Zach Bedell implemented – mainly because he doesn’t link it up with the chapter breaks. I guess I expected that, since it actually reads HTML natively, Bookshelf should utilize the markup inherent in such a document. There’s no scrolling. There’s a free version available (BookshelfLT).

Kindle: No scrolling. No font change. No text/bg inversion. No annotations. Navigation is not ideal, if you want to jump from page to page. The library management is only so so, just like eReader.

I’ve read 1.5 novels now on the iPhone Kindle app and it works quite well. In fact, if the Kindle app for iPhone had been available all along, I probably never would’ve bought my original Kindle in the first place.

And my one line review of Kindle for iPhone should have read it’s fine. It is a very basic reader, probably one step behind eReader 1.0 (since it didn’t have the text/background invert.) I don’t have Kindle books, so the “whispersync’ing” of bookmarks wouldn’t work for me.

One neat thing I noticed is that iKindle can read unencrypted MobiReader files as is. Just copy unencrypted MobiReader files into the “User/Applications//Documents/ebooks” directory on the iPod Touch/iPhone.

I don’t have any “sideways”-encrypted Mobi books (i.e. from Mobireader wrapped DRM to Kindle wrapped DRM) to test, though.

My eyes are not brilliant, but I have no difficulty reading in eReader on iPhone at Medium size, which gets a decent amount of text on a single page. My commute is just under an hour, and I will read pretty much all that time, sometimes even when walking along, if immersed in a good book.

For reference material the small screen wouldn’t be good, but for content that is read in a simple linear fashion, the iPhone screen is plenty big enough for me.