By now Stanza is the most robust e-reading application for iOS. It’s packed with features other apps, like Kindle or iBooks are missing. However it has one big disadvantage: no cloud-based bookshelf. The application is associated to a device not an account. There is no way to sync books and bookmarks like in Kindle. It’s fine when you have one device. Things get complicated to those iPhone or iPod Touch users who are buying iPads. They realize that to read books they collected in Stanza, they need to download them again. There are a few ways to transfer books to Stanza. I’d...

A recent exchange on a message board I frequent led me to a surprising realization: there is a demand for ebook readers even for very young children, and it might not be a device maker that wins this niche at all. It might be a peripheral maker. Here's why. The initial poster was looking for advice on a reading device for her toddler daughter, let's call her D. D is already an avid reader, enjoys paper books immensely, and also enjoys playing with Beatrix Potter downloads on Mama's Kindle (she can turn the pages already herself). Mama never thought she would consider...

Wingedchariot has launched a picture book app for children on the iPad. They claim that it is the first one. At $2.99, the book can be read in English, Estonian and Japanese and will work on the iPhone and iPad Touch as well. The book includes animations and stickers. The "stickers" can be printed, resized and emailed to friends. If anyone reads it please let us know what it is like. The iTunes link is here....

David Morgenstern has an editorial on ZDNet in which he predicts a grim future for e-book device manufacturers that aren’t Apple. He notes that over the last few days, not one but two high-profile tablets have been cancelled—Microsoft’s two-screened Courier and HP’s Windows 7 slate—and he lays their cancellation squarely at the feet of the iPad. He also suggests that the three million unit guesstimate being tossed around for the Kindle device’s sales may be grossly overinflated, and it might well have sold below one million. (Though, given Amazon’s reticence to release numbers, either guess is probably equally valid.) Meanwhile,...

I wasn’t sure whether to cover this story, given that it does not seem to have a great deal to do with e-books on the face of it. But on the other hand, it relates to the viability of developing for the iPhone and iPad as a whole, and e-book applications (both reader apps and stand-alone encapsulated appbooks) have to be developed just like anything else. Apple’s OS 4.0 SDK includes a new license agreement—new terms that developers must abide by. And one of these terms is a prohibition on “applications that link to Documented APIs through an...

And now I come to the end of my two-week experiment with the Sony Reader PRS-700. It’s been interesting, and I’ll have some last thoughts on the whole experience after the jump. But as I was getting ready to package the device up, I realized there was one last function that I hadn’t tested yet: how it played audio. Audio The device came pre-loaded with two piano jazz MP3s by Jun-ichi Nagahara, so I plugged in my earphones and listened through them. The control scheme was simple enough: a pause button, a slider showing how far through an audio file one...

One of the big tests for the Sony PRS-700, and the thing I’ve been studying the most, is how well it displays the different formats of books it reads. Over the last few days, I have done more reading than I had done in the previous month, and am ready to make some observations. In this post, I will cover ePub and LRF-formatted books. In the next one, I will look at PDFs. Note that the comparison photos above and below may not show any of the platforms at its best, due to strange tricks that backlighting and flash photography play on...

I am in St. Louis this weekend, along with my parents, for a visit to my brother, sister-in-law, and four nieces and nephews. I am away from my own desktop computer, and am having to make do with a slightly flaky Ubuntu laptop---and do not quite have either the energy or the facilities to write the in-depth examination of how the PRS-700 deals with different e-book formats that I had intended. However, I have brought along the PRS-700 (as well as my iPod Touch) and have observed a few possibly-unexpected uses of the Sony Reader---and another flaw or two---along the way. (Update:...