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By David Rothman

StanzaBooksOnBoardStoreBooksOnBoard—not just Fictionwise and others—now offers an e-book store for fans of the Stanza e-reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s a cinch to reach BooksOnBoard on an iPhone orTouch if you’ve already installed Stanza. Just fire up Stanza, go to the Onlne Catalog, then choose the BooksOnBoard eBook Shop and search or browse.

There are some DRM-related hassles, but we can blame them on the publishers requiring DRM, not on Stanza or BooksOnBoard . Plus, we can root for Stanza and BooksOnBoard to simplify the process further in the future.

New wrinkles from Books on Board

Of significance:

–Lower upfront prices on at least some titles than Fictionwise offers. I suspect it’s a matter of preference and the individual price situations on various books. Some may prefer the FW club approach. I haven’t checked this out.

–Snazziest catalog yet created for Stanza. Terrific job, BooksOnBoard!

–Possible biz model of making the full list of titles only accessible via search and displaying just certain titles when browsing the catalog. True? And a permanent situation or just a temporary one? Yes, as a reader I’d prefer all titles to be available.

–Much simpler registration and purchase process than the other Stanza-based catalogs.

imageI tested the purchase process on Hard Revolution, a novel by George Pelecanos, the D.C. crime writer. Darned smooth on the whole! The Stanza version of Books on Board apparently picked up my earlier registration with the main store. The biggest slowdown was the need to type in my credit card number, apparently for the benefit of eReader’s DRM, with which Stanza can mercifully cope.

Remember, eReader’s DRM is in fact among the gentlest systems. Here’s yet another reminder that independent stores like BooksOnBoard and Fictionwise, the owner of the eReader format, could better compete against Amazon without their customers’ suffering the hassles of DRM. Publishers, please take note. There is a reason why sites like TeleRead, MobileRead and BookSquare keep returning again and again to the DRM issue; we think of it whenever we buy a book from a large publisher—a process that may not happen as often as it should, thanks to the inconveniences of “protection.” On the iPhone, we’re talking about 16 bleepin’ digits on a virtual keyboard.

Amazon’s Kindle has the smoothest purchase process so far, but do you really want to the publishing business to be built so heavily around just one huge company? Meanwhile, I understand that BooksOnBoard lets publishers easily choose whether or not they want DRM, at least with ePub. Great! Whenever publishers allow do-it-yourself uploads, this should be the norm.

Related: My Washington, D.C., fiction guide, with Pelecanos listed among the current stars.

Update, 11:30 p.m.: After posting the above, I contacted Lexcycle, the Stanza developer, and received the following answer about making the DRM a bit more tolerable: “No, sadly the new version of Stanza will not end the need to type the 16 digits… we may be able to work with BOB such that you only have to enter the information once (and thereafter the system will remember it) but that work hasn’t started yet.” Nothing like DRM to simplify technological progress and reduce the costs of developing new products, eh?

Update, 4:46 a.m., February 21: Going into my account area at the regular BooksOnBoard, I found an eReader file of the Pelecanos book. Works great with the eReader software on my desktop machine.

Disclosure / Reminder: The Solomon Scandals, my Washington novel, is one of the featured titles on sale at BooksOnBoard. No mandatory DRM for buyers of Scandals. Thanks, BooksOnBoard! May Pelecanos’s publishers in time show the same enlightenment that BooksOnBoard and Twilight Times Books have.

 
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