Children’s stories written for the iPhone
Aya Karpinska has written a series of illustrated short stories for children that are designed to be read on an iPhone and take advantage of the zoom and panning functions. Great idea. If you don’t have an iPhone, you can watch a demo video or view an in-browser version.
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eBooks on the iPhone
Back in the days before ReadingHacks.com existed, I suggested that the Amazon Kindle might turn out to be the tipping point for ebooks. By this I meant that having the backing of a well established bookstore like Amazon might make ebooks a bigger deal in the mainstream. My biggest concern has always been the cost. How many people are going to pay $400 for a device specifically to read ebooks?
If you have been living under a rock for the last little while, you may have missed all the hype about Apple’s new 3G iPhone. I had thought the Kindle would be a big deal because it had the backing of a big bookseller. I now wonder if the iPhone is going to do even more for ebooks for three reasons:
- It has a whole lot of hype and excitement already associated with it. People are excited about anything it can do just because it’s being done on an iPhone. It doesn’t matter if plenty of other phones have been used for email, the fact that the iPhone does it it special. Partly marketing and hype, and partly the fact that Apple tend to do things well.
- A large number of people are going to buy one anyway. Why fork out $400 for a Kindle when you already have an iPhone that does a pretty good job of reading ebooks itself?
- iPhone is pretty. Kindle is beige.
Along the same lines, Silicon Valley Insider also think the iPhone is bad news for Kindle. Although they suggest the benefits of Kindle when compared with iPhone might be screen size, battery life and the ability to easily download books. I suspect the book availablity issue will work out with people like eReader.com even if Amazon won’t support other platforms. As for a bigger screen and better battery life, sure they’d both be nice but whether they make is worth having a second expensive device is another question.
If you want to read more opinions about this, plug the words “iphone” and “ebooks” into your search engine of choice, you’ll find plenty to read. Or even easier, here a handful of articles I have come across in my travels over the last couple of days:
Before the latest hype about the 3G iPhone, ReadWriteWeb had already asked the question Is the iPhone the ultimate ebook reader?
More recently, Carolyn Kellog over at the LA Times has blogged briefly about her experience reading ebooks on her new iPhone.
BoingBoing have reported that some people have grabbed freely available public domain ebooks and started selling them on the Apple App store for 99 cents a pop.
eReader.com struggled to handle all the new iPhone 3G users downloading ebooks they had previously purchased and wanted to load onto their shiny new toys.
