Kindle for iPhone and iPod touch is available for free from Apple’s App Store on iPhone and iPod touch or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.  You can shop for hundreds of thousands of books, and wirelessly transfer them to your iPhone and iPod Touch.

[via MacWorld]

According to Ian Freed, vice president, Amazon Kindle, the most common feedback they heard from customers was that they wanted a better experience for purchasing new Kindle books from their iPhones. “We’ve been working hard to respond to that feedback with a new web site optimized for Safari on iPhone and we’re excited to do that today.”

Kindle for iPhone and iPod touch is available for free from Apple’s App Store on iPhone and iPod touch or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.  You can shop for hundreds of thousands of books, and wirelessly transfer them to your iPhone and iPod Touch.

According to Lexcycle’s blog:

We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition. Customers will still be able to browse, buy, and read ebooks from our many content partners. We look forward to offering future products and services that we hope will resonate with our passionate readers.

We are excited to join forces with a company that has innovated on behalf of readers for over a decade and is a pioneer in ebooks. Like Amazon, we believe there is a lot of innovation ahead for ebooks and we could not think of a better company to join during this exciting time.

[via NYT]

Swiss communications firm, Monec Holding, has reportedly filed suit in a Virginia district court. Monec accuses the iPhone maker of “patent infringement, unfair trade practices, monopolization, and tortious interference for allegedly treading on its January 2002 patent No. 6,335,678 titled ‘Electronic device, preferably an electronic book.’” Monec is “a leading innovator for mobile, globally usable communication solutions…with user-friendly products and pioneering solutions, Monec provides companies and users with secure, wireless access solutions which offer highest degree of flexibility, functionality, speed and independence.”

The seriousness about the filing is Monec claiming that Apple violated their patent. Reasons for the lawsuit suggest that Apple violated it via the development of a “lightweight” electronic device with a “touch-screen” LCD display. This having the “dimensions approximately one page of a book can be illustrated at normal size, this display being integrated in a flat, frame-like housing.” There have been eBook applications available for a while although the lawsuit has only come to light now.

[via CNET]

The Wattpad’s iPhone experience proved it. You can now enjoy the full Wattpad experience on your iPhone or iPod Touch! Wattpad today announced that its popular ebook reading application is now downloadable directly on the iPhone for free [iTunes link].

The YouTube-like community for reading and sharing ebooks app already packed with features include: personal library management, auto-bookmarking, portrait and landscape reading modes, configurable fonts and colors, automatic scrolling, personalized recommendations and social features.

“The Apple iPhone and iPod Touch have revolutionized the ebook landscape,” enthused Allen Lau, Co-founder of Wattpad. “We combine the large touch screens of the iPhone, our proven reading technology and huge collection of user-generated ebooks to provide the best possible user experience on mobile devices for free. Best of all, you don’t need a dedicated ebook subscription service or device, like Amazon Kindle or Sony eReader, as your mobile phone is always with you.”

[via Wattpad]

By using this app, you can read Kindle books using a simple interface. You can shop for hundreds of thousands of books, and wirelessly transfer them to your iPhone and iPod Touch.

Features include:

• Buy a Kindle book from your Mac, PC, or iPhone using a Web browser
• Read first chapters of any book for free before you buy
• Download the Kindle books you already own for free — they are automatically backed up on Amazon.com
• Adjust the text size, add bookmarks, and view the annotations you created on your Kindle device.

Amazon is no stranger to the iPhone. Amazon earlier released a shopping application that allows customers to find new items by letting them snap and submit photos of stuff they already own.

You can download the free Kindle app here. For now, the iPhone application is available for the U.S. market only.

[via TechFlash]

Like Kindle, Shortcovers will let you read the first chapter of any book free of charge. From there, the app offers you two options: You can either buy a chapter at a time, or opt to purchase the whole book. Single chapters are expected to cost around 99 cents a pop, while full books will range between $10 and $20, on average. If you decide you want to get a book physically shipped, you can do that, too.

The application is expected to be offered on Apple’s iTunes online App Store soon.

In this area, Amazon has confirmed that its Kindle book collection will soon be accessible on mobile devices, while Google’s already announced to put their Book Search service onto iPhone  as well as Android devices.

[via PCWorld]

There’s an interesting story behind this mobile book search project:

If you use Google Book Search, you’ll notice that our previews are composed of page images made by digitizing physical copies of books. These page images work well when viewed from a computer, but prove unwieldy when viewed on a phone’s small screen.

Our solution to make these books accessible is to extract the text from the page images so it can flow on your mobile browser just like any other web page. This extraction process is known as Optical Character Recognition (or OCR for short).

Just point your mobile browser to http://books.google.com/m. Happy mobile  reading!

[via Google Mobile Blog]