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Stanza, the go-to e-book reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch, has been updated to incorporate a built-in book store. Now users of the free e-reader application can download commercial ePub-format books direct to their iPhones, over the air.
This can only boost the "sales" of the free application. According to Lexcycle's Neelan Choksi, Stanza has been downloaded almost 600,000 times, and users are in turn downloading 50-60,000 books a day.
The service comes courtesy of a partnership between Lexcycle (the people behind Stanza) and the online e-book seller Fictionwise. We tested the service out, and had a quick chat with Neelan Choksi about Stanza, e-book piracy and the upcoming Kindle 2.
I'm a big fan of Stanza, as regular readers will know. It has its flaws, but with Stanza, my iPod Touch has become my day-to-day reading device, partly because of the lack of English-language paper books in Spain.
One drawback has been the getting of content. Free is good, but I want new titles. My first question to Choksi was about availability. Would I be able to buy books from Spain? His answer was truthful:
I fired up Stanza (no software update is needed -- the new store just shows up in the online section of the app) to find out. And guess what? It works in Spain! While the browsing of titles is as slick as the rest of the Stanza experience, the store itself is still a little clunky. In fact, it crashed the application when I was giving it my credit card details. Here are some shots of the store, displayed within the app using Webkit:
This should change. "Eventually, you should have a seamless experience, never hitting the embedded browser," says Choksi. The plan is to have the book store operate just like the iPhone's built-in App Store.
After my crash, I headed to the Fictionwise store on my Mac and did the heavy lifting there. After buying the book (Charles Bukowski's Ham on Rye) I tried again with Stanza. You purchases are stored in a "bookshelf". Sure enough, my new purchase was there, ready for download:
Before reading the book for the first time, you have to give Stanza your credit card number and name. This is used to unlock the book, an unfortunate side-effect of the publisher-imposed DRM. In fact, this isn't the only problem caused by publishers' paranoia. I asked Choksi why e-books cost the same as their paper equivalents, despite the the savings on printing, shipping and storage. "Printing and other costs of physical books has been replaced by DRM costs," he told us, "also, support with ebooks is pretty high as well."
So, not only does the DRM make it harder for the honest user to buy a book, it also makes it more expensive. No wonder the e-book market is so slow getting started. But of course, there are alternatives.
Stanza offers an open directory meaning that anyone can add a catalog to the application. All you need to do is type in (or click on) a properly formatted xml link and a new catalog will be added to Stanza. There is at least one (very good) repository of books which are both free and of questionable legality. Does Lexcycle see this as a problem? Not really. In fact, Choski is more worried by the DRM that causes it:
"It bothers me personally," he says, "we are big proponents of open-ness and know the value of it and know how badly ebooks needs a standard, and how useless DRM is, and how bad the proliferation of proprietary format and proprietary DRM is for the users." This doesn't mean he's pro-piracy. Rather, he's anti-lockdown. "Our value of open-ness is not an encouragement of piracy in any way."
There's no doubt the e-book market is growing, albeit slowly. Stanza is free, but the business plan is surely to take a kickback for every book sold. What about other readers, particularly the Kindle? The v2.0 of Amazon's reader will arrive early next year, and has the advantage of an always-on connection and the integration of Amazon's trusted, and easy to use store. Is Choski concerned?
"All ships rise with the tide right now. Unless [Kindle 2] is a multifunction device that fits in your picket I'm not worried."
Press release [Lexcycle]
Online store [Fictionwise]
Stanza product page [iTunes]
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