If you want an e-book reader but can't afford to shell out the cash for the Amazon Kindle, you could try the a free app called Stanza that just hit the iTunes App Store. While you can't purchase brand new books through the app, it can read .mobi files, so any e-books you do buy and download onto your computer could be transferred over. 

For the moment, the only e-books you can download through Stanza are those in the public domain and Creative Commons texts from Feedbooks. Even so, many a classic is in the public domain, making for a rather literary experience while on the go. 

And while this will probably never happen, it would seem to be rather easy to sync up the Stanza app with Amazon.com, allowing seamless e-book purchases and downloads. Amazon would sell a lot of e-books but they'd cut out their Kindle, which doesn't seem like a plausible move on their part.

[via Gadget Lab at Wired.com]