TeleRead has a post up about Stanza and other ebooks/ebook readers being available for the iPhone/iPod Touch 2.0 environment, in particular the iPhone 3G. BookSquare, in turn, has a post wondering where the heck all the publishers are:

On a weekend when headlines were there for the grabbing and customers were searching for both toys and content, the publishing industry, perhaps practicing summer hours, was curiously silent. Not a single major initiative, announcement, horns-blaring call to check out these great offerings on iTunes.

Speaking as somebody who went through the heinous process of getting a technical book formatted for the Kindle:

  1. There’s no way on Earth I’m rushing to ePub until there’s some critical mass of readers (or reader-capable devices) out there. That would mean I’d miss out on the iPhone 3G launch, but that’s no big deal.
  2. There’s no way on Earth I’m claiming to have an ePub book usable on an iPhone until I have one of the things to test it on. Yes, ePub is a standard. So is HTML, and I’ve run into  way more than my fair share of Web sites that don’t work properly in all browsers. Theoretically, Kindle displays Mobipocket, but if I hadn’t sprung for a Kindle, a book that would have looked fine on the Mobipocket Reader would have looked ghastly on the device (4-color greyscale, etc.). If I want to do a quality job, I gotta have the device and test the generated ebook on the device, not just hope a standard works.

Personally, speaking as somebody who’s used everything from a Sony Clie to a Kindle for ebooks, the iPhone/iPod Touch would be too small for my 40-year-old eyes, unless I only want a handful of words visible at a time. I own an iPod Touch, and the screen is excellent for video, but just too tiny for any reasonable quantity of text at a nice font size. The Kindle is a fairly decent trade-off between physical size and screen size.

Specifically for CommonsWare, the iPhone/iPod Touch will be pretty useless for programming books — code listings will either involve tons of scrolling or be unreadable. Hence, while we may support ePub in the future, the iPhone isn’t going to be the targeted device.

Of course, I’m hoping somebody makes an Android ebook reader — not just the software (Stanza or FBReader would probably work), but something in a larger form factor.