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500,000+ downloads of Stanza e-reader for iPhone/Touch; now what if HarperStudio could reach this market?
November 12, 2008 | 11:02 am
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By David Rothman
Lexcycle’s Stanza e-reader has drawn 500,000+ downloads from the iPhone App Store since mid-July, as suggested earlier.
“The current version of Stanza is available in twelve different languages and has users in more than 50 countries,” says a Lexcycle release.
The Stanza Online Catalog includes over 40,000 book and other items, “in more than 20 languages.” I wonder what the book download count is.
Significantly, Stanza can display files in ePub, the IDPF standard, which participating publishers are using. That’s not all. Obviously not one of catalog entries carries a DRM taint; could a whole new book distribution system be aborning?
Speaking of Stanza and the DRM issue…
Also check out eReader Death Match: iPhone vs. Kindle, in the 26th story blog, associated with the HarperStudio imprint, which mentioned Stanza’s lack of DRM capability as a barrier. Photo shows the HarperStudio crew, with publisher Bob Miller at the left.
Just what do you think of the HarperStudio blog’s statement, from last month, that “all roads lead back to DRM”?
Will HarperStudio, billed as open to experimentation, please try do something about DRM, the way Pan Macmillan is? It should urge authors not to hamstring themselves with consumer-hostile “protection.” And then maybe it can offer ePub books for the growing iPhone market.
Just in case HarperStudio is already attempting DRM bypasses or planning to, I’ll e-mail the company for the latest. Last I’d heard, people there were undecided.
On the multiformat bundling front…
Meanwhile the best of luck to Miller and colleagues with the imprint. Among other things, HarperStudio is striving for more sustainable publishing models—a laudable goal for appropriate books if the house treats writers fairly.
I especially like Miller’s statement that readers shouldn’t have to buy the same books again and again in different formats. Avoiding DRM would simplify the company’s plan to experiment with the mutliformat bundling approach.
Related: Why publishers should give away e-books with hardbacks—or maybe even trade paperbacks.
Note: The “headline” is the file name for this item is inaccurate. While a news release talks about 40,000+ books being downloaded everyday, the 40K is really the number of titles in the catalog. I wish Lexcycle would clarify the release’s wording.
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Comments:
We bundled my book in a zip with 8 formats (no DRM): html, epub, imp, lit, lrf, mobi, pdb, pdf because no, we didn’t think it was fair to either lock the content to someone who’d purchased it nor limit the reader to certain devices.
Of course, having a standard format a la mp3 would’ve helped that process along a lot more…
Way to go, MoJo! David
I do have to admit to wondering just how many downloads they’ll get after they come out of “beta” and go to their full $15 asking price. I bet the number of people who are actually willing to pay for it will be at least an order of magnitude smaller.
I think Stanza needs to team up with some web publishers who will pay their development costs and then bundle stanza with the eBooks.
Possibly somewhat remotely related, but if you follow back to the original Forbes article this was based on
(http://www.forbes.com/2008/10/02/stanza-kindle-iphone-tech-personal-cx_ag_ja_1002stanza.html)
you’ll read the following:
“Lexcycle currently offers only public domain books–most of which were published more than 50 years ago–and creative commons titles offered up without copyright by the books’ authors.”
Somebody writing about their own industry in a reputable publication like Forbes should at least know that publishing under a Creative Commons license does not automatically repudiate copyright; neither does offering a work for free.
I repeatedly see mistakes of this kind around copyright issues – if the experts aren’t able to understand it, how is the average end user going to?
I think eReader is the more accurate indicator of e-book penetration because it is linked with Fictionwise, which is a pay site, so the assumption might be that more of the people who downloaded it did so less by random and more because they specifically wanted to use it to buy and read books on the iPod.
Stanza was okay (until it started crashing a lot after a recent update) but I prefer the look/feel and slightly snappier performance of eReader. And I see no functionality in the Stanza app that I can’t get elsewhere. For me, there is no way I would pay $15 for an app like that when Fictionwise/eReader will give me one for free.
Agreed.
One more thing about bundling ebook formats:
There is a split in opinion about the viability of assigning one ISBN to generic “ebook” or requiring publishers to assign one ISBN to each ebook format they offer.
Obviously, this would be prohibitively expensive for smaller publishers (like B10 Mediaworx) and would stifle any incentive to create MORE (not fewer) ways to read ebooks–especially at a time when the big houses are slow (if not loath) to pursue digitization at all (and then only after much whining and stamping of feet).
I’m not sure that offering a bundle in a zip (or other container) would fulfill a requirement for the use of ONE ISBN should things come to that, but I think a case could be made for its koshericity.
Ereader is a better application and I think it supports PDB DRM (I don’t know for sure because I remove DRM or don’t buy DRM products). I really like the Bookshelf application, as well. You can’t download books directly onto it from the iPhone but it supports a wide variety of formats, including mobipocket. So I can strip the DRM off my mobi files and read them on both my Kindle and my iPod Touch, depending on which device I have with me at the time and if I need a back light or not. Convenient, no?