In lieu of my previous post commending Vodaphone on their recent mobile ebook strategy, I think it is important to draw light on some interesting statistics that were recently brought to my attention. We know that Citigroup has estimated the total Kinde sales for 2008 to be somewhere around the 380,000 mark. Well, as of yesterday a company called Stanza has reported the sales of their ebook reader for the iPhone to be at the 395,000 mark and this is apparently increasing by 5,000 downloads a day. I always believed that the Kindle would be the tool that truly spurs on the e-book revolution. However, I may be wrong! The iPhone and smart phones in general may in fact be the real instigaor here. If smart companies like Stanza can whip together beautiful iPhone applications like they have done there is serious potential for an increasing number of people to move towards the e-book format.
I am one of those 395,000 people and can say that I love their application. The form factor on the phone does make it hard to read the books at times, however if they were to integrate Spreeds technology into their platform, they could have a seriously killer application. I am very excited to see how this and the host of other e-book reader (that I am sure are currently waiting to be accepted by Apple) progress in the market. Maybe Amazon is wrong. Maybe people don’t want yet another device to carry around. Maybe people are happy enough reading their books on their phone while on the go and reserving the physical copies for when they get back to their home libraries. Only time will tell.
Every now and then I read about a potentially revolutionary change and the combo of Stanza, smartphone and Spreed would seem to fit the bill. You’re right, who wants to carry another anything. I am awaiting the RIM Storm; hope Stanza will work on it, too.
eReader for the iPhone is a very good ebook application that has been around for years. Many folks have used this on Treos. Once you establish an account at ereader.com, you can download books directly to the iPhone. I’ve not checked out Stanza but I will. The great part about eReader is that once you purhcase a dictionary, you can simply touch and hold a word in any book and instantly bring up the definition in the the dictionary and then switch back to your place in the book. Many of the most popular dictionaries are available. Lots of bestsellers are available as well.