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By David Rothman

image Lucky for Amazon that it’s done a Kindle app for the iPhone. 16% of teens, 30% of professionals plans to buy iPhones, reports CNN.

And I suspect that the iPod Touch, which generally can run iPhone software, probably isn’t faring too shabbily, either.

Then again, 37% of of “well-heeled cell phone owners” plan to buy a BlackBerry “in the next six months.”

Meanwhile one study is predicting that netbook shipments will reach 47.4 million by 2012. How long until we see Kindle apps for the various flavors of Windows and linux that the netbooks are running? Not to mention Android—destined for cellphones, netbooks, tablets, you name it.

The ePub angle

Simply put, it’s clearer than ever that e-books will be read on a number of platforms, and ePub can be a godsend for consumers while driving down costs. Let’s root for Adobe and other major vendors to reduce the expense and complexity of e-book creation software, and for the IPDF to pursue the open source route, too—reinforcing standards and developing wrinkles of interest to commercial vendors.

Just a fraction of books are available in E. The right creation tools could help make it easier for publishers to use ePub to reach a number of platforms at once. So, needless to say, could be a reduction in the use of DRM.

Related: ‘Is Adobe hindering e-books?’: ePub rendering is flawed—which has drawn more than 20 comments, including some encouragingly candid comments from Adobe’s Peter Sorotokin.

 
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