These days, the iPhone is starting to remind me of that old Beatles’ song “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby.” Whether it’s the accessories market, third-party developers, or website designers, everybody wants to cash in on the iPhone—even that most old school of media, books.
Harper Collins has launched a website specifically targeting iPhone users, allowing them to read sample chapters, browse titles, and even look at cover art. And, of course, every title has a prominent “Buy” link at the top which will shoot you right over to Harper Collins’s store so you can order the book online. At the moment, there’s a pretty limited selection of titles.
The interface itself is kind of a mixed bag. The text are images scanned from the book, so they take a little while to load, especially over an EDGE connection, and the size of the text varies, meaning that you may have to resize it to fit the iPhone’s display and be legible.
While I’m long been a voracious reader, I’m still not convinced I’ll spend a lot of time reading books on my iPhone; it just seems so much less convenient than carrying around my old standby paperback. But if you’re stuck some place and want a little relaxing reading, I suppose you could do worse.
The only thing I miss from my Palm days is an ebook reader. I'm lazy. I want to lie down, prop up my PDA with a pillow on my chest and have the reader scroll the text by so I don't even have to turn pages. I did that for years from my Palm V to my Axim X50 to my LifeDrive. I wish I had some equivalent reader on my iPhone. I tried my first audiobook last week. It was a pleasant experience, but I would rather read. It was Stephen King's LT's Theory of Pets if you must know what the audiobook was.
I'm the same as Walt -- I love having a few ebooks with me at all times. But my Palm has been set aside for a shiny new iPhone, so I've been looking into what's available...
So far there's scrollbox.org, manybooks.net, and Books.app (see http://code.google.com/p/iphoneebooks/ -- you'll need to hack your iPhone to install it). At this point, if you've got network access you're good to go; if you don't both scrollbox and manybooks offer "bookmarklets" for storing a book in a data:URL. And at some point I expect Books.app to make it easy for the rest of us to store a few hundred titles directly on our iPhones.
Hm, has anyone tried booksoniphone.com yet?