iPhone 3G Made Simple comes by way of Martin Trautschold and Gary Mazo of Made Simple book and e-book fame — likely familiar names to any of our CrackBerry.com friends — have put their training talents to work on the iPhone 3G and the result? 376 pages chock full of photos and easy to understand guides.
It’s available now in e-book (PDF) for $20 and is coming in August in good old printed form (soft cover). For TiPb readers, however, Martin and Gary are giving away 5 free copies of the e-book!
Just head on over to the TiPb iPhone Forum and let us know you want a copy!
Our best frenemy forever, CrackBerry.com’s Kevin sent us word that Canadians currently excluded from all the Amazon Kindle E-Book app goodness may just have an alternative. Seems Chapters/Indigo (think Barnes and Nobles with maple syrup, eh?) is getting into the game, and onto the devices, with a new service called Shortcovers.
While Kevin was sickened by the prominence of the iPhone in the above video, we thought it was fantastic. (And if the fugly look of the BlackBerry app compared to the hot sexay of the iPhone version is any indication of how this whole BlackBerry App World vs. iPhone App Store sitch will work out for RIM…)
Any of our readers to the north going to check it out?
Yes, folks, I was one of the suckers eager buyers of the 2nd edition of the Kindle. My pain is your pleasure, though, as you can get some early screenshots of the app already loaded up with books via Whispersync.
As you may have just read in our previous post, Amazon has just released Kindle for iPhone for free in the App Store (iTunes link), you cannot buy Kindle books directly from the app. Instead you can purchase inside Mobile Safari, from your desktop, or from a Kindle
The text is nice and readable (and you can resize as well). The app keeps a “page metaphor,” meaning that instead of being able to scroll up and down, you swipe left and right to switch pages. A single tap on the screen bring up a menu to give you back, bookmark, text-size, and a sync button to sync your last page read with a Kindle.
The Whispersync tech works exactly as advertised — books purchased show up as “Archived” and you can then download them directly to your iPhone.
Amazon’s Kindle App for iPhone and iPod touch is now live in the App Store. It allows access to hundreds of thousands of Amazon Kindle format e-books (we assume the whole 200K plus library).
The Amazon Kindle for iPhone app is FREE (iTunes Link), but it looks like books need to be purchased from Amazon directly via PC or Mac and transferred over, or from the iPhone via Mobile Safari. Most e-books should run $9.99. Like with the Kindle device itself, you can sample first chapters for free, adjust text size and bookmark. You can’t annotate but you can view Kindle annotations.
Whispersync is also enabled so you can start reading on the Kindle, switch to the iPhone, and basically go back and forth without losing your place. Books you’ve already purchased for the Kindle, of course, can be placed on the iPhone or iPod touch as well.
Note: Per Dieter, this doesn’t seem to be showing up on the iPhone App Store app yet, and — of course — it’s not available (yet?) in the Canadian App Store (or any international App Store?)
Any Kindle users out there ready to test this out and let us know how it’s working?
Yeah, let the speculation continue! No sooner did we blog about Apple’s rumored March 24th Special Event being an iPhone 3.0 or even iTablet into, then we came across this wonderful article up at Newsarama.com featuring uber-Apple tech journo, Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun-Times. Most tantalizingly:
“There’s something I keep hearing, and I don’t think I’d rank it as high as a rumor, but it’s an interesting story that I keep hearing, that for awhile, trucks loaded with books would arrive at a loading dock on the Apple campus, and offload big, big, big, big, huge load of books, and then the trucks would leave empty. And Apple does not have a 100,000-book employee library there on the Apple campus,” Ihnatko said. “So one is prone to believe that they’re doing something with these books, such as turning them into text for some purpose we can only guess at. There’s been a long-standing rumor that Apple has been silently preparing to open a bookstore on the iTunes store, and they want to make sure that they have a very large stock of electronic titles when they do open.
The entire article is definitely worth a read, and given the way print media, with associated delivery and distribution costs is going, an Apple-fronted e-Book reader would be good news. An Apple and iTunes Store front e-Comic Book reader could save Marvel and DC from their own current myopia as well.
Of course, even the mighty Amazon has failed to show there’s a mainstream market for the Kindle yet (we don’t believe they’ve even hit the magic 1 million sold mark yet, have they?) and Apple has never been one to lead markets, only consumer-ize them, so we’ll see…
The techeratti love the Kindle — so what if it’s only available in the US, is selling half-as well as the Zune, Apple targeted “reading” in a recent commercial, and Google just optimized their Books service for the iPhone? It’s not like Amazon is making an iPhone reader too, is it?
“We are excited to make Kindle books available on a range of mobile phones. We are working on that now,” an Amazon spokesman told the New York Times, while offering zero other details. [...] I’ve asked for more clarification, but I’m not hopeful–it’s difficult to get Amazon to acknowledge that the sun sets in the West. [UPDATE: Via email, an Amazon spokesman allows that "we are excited" but nothing else.] The big question is whether Amazon intends to sell titles that can be read on Apple’s (AAPL) handsets.
Makes sense. Amazon is essentially a software and services company, books for your shelves, movies for your player, even food for your fridge. They’re not a consumer electronics manufacturer like Apple. Kindle-style E-Books would be a much better revenue generator for them if they — like audio books — could play on a variety of platforms. (We don’t see Audible making their own proprietary MP3 player, do we?)
I’d love to see the Kindle’s market place opened up to the iPhone. How about you? Want the latest best sellers, this term’s text books, and the WSJ all beamed directly to your iPhone?
Authors, no doubt, may continue to have a problem with Google willfully ignoring copyright for their own content lust, while mobile users jump up and down in glee, like one author and mobile accomplisher, Andy Ihnatko is doing on his Celestial Waste of Bandwidth:
Yes, all 1.5 million public-domain texts in the Google Books project are now available to mobile users, behind a fairly awesome, slick interface. [...] And I scroll down a bit and find many titles of interest. I give one of ‘em a tap, and soon I’m looking at a very credible little mobile book reader. [..] Good golly. If Google is evil, then they’re a Doctor Doom sort of evil. What’s a little evil, when the totalitarian dictator takes such wonderful, indulgent care of his subjects?
