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iPhone SDK may be late—delaying e-book apps
February 23, 2008 | 4:09 pm
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By David Rothman
E-book apps run “legitimately” on the iPhone might be delayed as a result of Apple being late in releasing its software developers kit. We were supposed to see the SDK by the end of February. But now people aren’t so sure.
Not to worry. We’re probably not talking months and months here, and meanwhile there are Web-based possibilities such as TextOnPhone. You could also run e-book apps unofficially, such as Books.app, but given the hassles involved, it’s probably better to wait or rely on TOP-style services. Or use the iPhone’s e-mail attachment capabilities to read PDFed e-books from sites such as Manybooks.net, which also lets iPhoners read e-books in bite-sized HTML.
Related: Gerry Manacsa‘s iPhones and eBooks: The Video, made last July (keep that in mind) and various people’s thoughts on the iPhone as an e-book reader.
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Comments:
Reading via attached PDF is actually not a bad experience (I’ve done this with my iPod touch), but the PDF reader is a little buggy: some PDFs simply fail to display, particularly large ones. Ironically, this includes the iPod touch user manual!
However, for e-books that are mostly text, it would indeed be fine. It also seems to cache such PDFs in the e-mail client for a lot longer than it caches visited web sites, so off-lining reading is viable.
Still, a real e-book reader, able to access books stored on the device, will be great… once the SDK becomes available, and the reader is written or ported.
Yawn.
You are missing THE big story:
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/02/23/any-month-now-the-real-final-death-of-palm/
You don’t need e-book app.
iPhone users can read more than 30,000 titles for free now on http://BooksoniPhone.com
You can also upload your own text on TextonPhone.com