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New iPhone e-book application takes aim at Amazon's Kindle

By Eric Engleman on December 23, 2008 at 10:55 AM PST

Comments (4) | Permalink

Is Apple's iPhone emerging as the primary competitor to Amazon's Kindle electronic book reader?

A New York-based mobile application developer, ScrollMotion, is making a host of best-selling books, including Stephanie Meyer's teen vampire drama "Twilight" and Philip Pullman's philosophical fantasy "The Golden Compass," available as applications for Apple's popular iPhone and iPod touch.

ScrollMotion has reportedly cut deals with a number of major publishing houses and plans to roll out a series of new releases and best sellers. It's one of a growing number of e-book applications popping up for the iPhone -- and moving onto Kindle's turf.

The timing is awkward for Amazon, which ran out of Kindles this holiday season after scoring a major product endorsement from talk show host Oprah Winfrey. The Amazon website give an 8-10 week wait for new Kindles. The online retailer is scheduled to come out with a next-generation Kindle next year, possibly in February.

Wired has more on ScrollMotion, noting that it has signed up publishers Houghton Mifflin, Simon & Schuster, Random House, Hachette and Penguin Group USA.

Other e-book apps for the iPhone include Stanza, eReader, Bookshelf and Classics. The Kindle also faces competition from Sony's e-book reader, a new device called eSlick, and others.

The New York Times today explores the growing visibility of electronic books, with the Kindle leading the way. Amazon doesn't disclose Kindle sales figures, but the Times says estimates range from 260,000 to a million units sold. The story also notes that iPhone applications gave a boost to electronic books this year and "are already starting to generate nearly as many digital book sales as the Sony Reader, though they still trail sales of books in the Kindle format."

I asked Ian Freed, the executive in charge of Kindle, about the iPhone application Stanza in an interview a few months ago, but he dodged the question. The growing ranks of iPhone e-book readers, however, is surely on Amazon's radar.

Reader said:

on December 23, 2008 at 2:03 PM

Realistically the iPhone isn't an ideal ebook platform. The screen is far too small and the battery life too short. All of the serious ebook competitors use e-ink displays with battery lives measured in days, not hours.

Fragmented efforts like Stanza and Scrollmotion will never put a serious dent in the broader market desired by Sony and Amazon. They are no different from niche ebook plays that have gone before like Mobipocket.

The only way Apple could potentially get market share is to launch their own ebook service integrated with iTunes - and they've said several times they have no plans in that area.

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Andrew Savikas said:

on December 23, 2008 at 2:16 PM

You left off David Pogue's "iPhone: The Missing Manual", which came out as an App last friday, and is already the #2 paid book app in iTunes. See http://missingmanuals.com/iphone_app/

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Reader said:

on December 24, 2008 at 7:10 PM

I love Apple products - I think Steve Jobs has done a brilliant jobs with the iPhone, iPod, and now Mac computers.

But the iPhone or iPod will never serve as a viable conduit to read books. Amazon's vision is odd - but I think they got it right: If you're reading, the device should "dissapear." The iPhone or a laptop is just a nuisance to read on because you can't curl up to them. Apple vs Amazon Kindle comparisons are getting old.

People misunderstand the audience Amazon is aiming to reach with the Kindle And that's people who love to read long form books. Amazon isn't trying to develop the next sexy gadget. It's trying to serve customer needs in ways that other companies have not. Right now, that means delivering a book to a reader in less than 60 seconds from anywhere in the US (that sure beats Amazon Prime's overnight delivery). This isn't a game changing innovation, but another small step that Amazon has taken to develop a loyal base of customers as more content is moving to digitial distribution. Which begs the question: so what? The so what is that Kindle is really only one small fraction of the company, and across all departments, small innovations are constantly being rolled for the sake of costumer convenience. The sum of all these innovations really make for a better customer experience.

If anyone was really interested in Amazon's well being, they should be tracking the rate at the company is rolling out new services, and how meaningful those service lauches are for the customer.

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Robotech_Master said:

on January 8, 2009 at 10:17 AM

A recent announcement by Fictionwise referred to a problem affecting 300,000 e-book files they had sold, describing it as "less than 4%" of their total sales.

Doing the math, this means they could have sold as many as 7,500,000 books during their ten-year lifetime—all of them meant for reading on devices with screens as small as the iPod's.

Clearly, people are reading on these devices. I hear time and time again people saying, "Oh, I could never read on a screen that small"—and then they try it, and find they DO like green eggs and ham, Sam I am.

The reason that newspaper columns are the width they are is that readability studies have determined that people read best when the lines are only 10-15 words wide at most. It means the eye doesn't have to travel as far when it scans the lines. iPhones and other PDAs have a screen that is just naturally about that wide.

The size also means the device is convenient enough to take everywhere, in your pocket, so you can whip it out whenever you have a minute or two to wait somewhere, such as in line at the grocery store or in public transit—something that you just can't do with a Kindle.

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