Ultimate e-reader: Smartphone?

Amazon will hold a press conference Monday at New York City’s Morgan Library. The online retailer is keeping mum on the topic, but industry observers predict the company will unveil a new version of the Kindle, its 15-month-old electronic book reader, with design changes making it easier to use.

But is the device whose first batch sold out in just 5½ hours already obsolete?

Readers who own Apple iPhones and iPod Touches have downloaded Stanza in droves. The free program is an e-reader that enables users to download free classics and buy contemporary e-books by authors from Stephen King to Cormac McCarthy. Since it became available when Apple’s App Store opened in June, Stanza has been downloaded more than 1.2 million times by users in 60 countries. At least 5 million books have been downloaded.

Amazon won’t release data on its Kindle, but Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney estimates it has sold 500,000. Sony Reader, as of December, had sales of 300,000 since its debut in October 2006. Stanza’s e-reader has much more potential: More than 17 million iPhones are in use and a few million more iPod Touches, which, like the iPhone, have wireless access.

Mr. Mahaney has called Kindle the “iPod of the book world,” but it now appears the iPod could be the iPod of the book world.

Apple, without even trying, might end up revolutionizing the publishing industry the way it did the music industry.

The Kindle killer?

Stanza is the most popular and most elegant of iPhone e-readers. You can easily change font typeface, size and color and flip pages back and forth with a single touch. A new version coming out in days will make it easier to dim the device. That backlighting is one advantage Stanza has over the Kindle you don’t need a light to read.

With the iPhone’s wireless capability and the fact that users carry them wherever they go, owners have a virtual world of knowledge constantly at their fingertips. Somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 distinct titles, from Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House” to Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” are available.

Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza, was started by three developers just a year ago. Marc Prud’hommeaux, the 35-year-old chief executive, had been interested in developing a reading application for desktop computers and mobile devices for a while and formed the company at the same time Apple opened up the iPhone to developers.

“We knew the profile of the iPhone was significantly different from other devices. It had a much more pleasant reading experience than other phones previously had,” Mr. Prud’hommeaux says. It wasn’t just the iPhone’s larger screen, but the way it rendered fonts and displayed high-resolution graphics. That’s one reason reading has taken off on it the way it never did on previous smartphones, like Palms and Pocket PCs.

Stanza is free, and so are about 50,000 of its books, most published before 1923 and so no longer under copyright. “We intend to keep it free,” Mr. Prud’hommeaux reports. “We’re dedicated to an open network. It drives adoption of the software.”

The company doesn’t make money on free books or books sold through third-party catalogs on the Web. “Basically, we take a cut of any book sold through the Stanza interface if it’s sold through our built-in online catalog.”

“We knew it would be big, but we’ve been stunned by the uptake,” says Mr. Prud’hommeaux, who also owns a Kindle and is reading “Revolutionary Road” through Stanza.

Stanza has gotten kudos from PC Magazine and Wired, and consumers voted it best free app in the 2008 Best App Ever Awards.

Story Continues →