Amazon Buys eBook Application for the iPhone

Amazon has bought Lexcyle, makers of the Stanza reader application, for an undisclosed price. Stanza has been downloaded by approximately 1.8 million users. Lexcycle says on its web site, “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.” But of course it’s now up to what Amazon plans. When launching their iPhone app for Kindle, Amazon made it clear that they find the iPhone an inferior platform for long-form immersive reading, but fine as an occasional solution and “companion device” when your Kindle isn’t handy, “in line at the grocery store or between meetings.”

Amazon spokesperson Cinthia Portugal says, “It’s very early days for e-books, and we believe there is a lot of innovation ahead of us. Lexcycle is a smart, innovative company and we look forward to working with them to innovate on behalf of readers.”

The acquisition does raise a lot of questions about this emerging landscape–leaving the answers as pure speculation for now. One safe presumption is that the Stanza by Fictionwise e-store won’t be long for this world now that the two formerly independent companies are owned by Amazon and Barnes & Noble respectively (which in turn could affect the 40 percent of 100,000 titles readable on Stanza via their license of eReader.)

Another immediate area of speculation is the ABA’s plans to work with Lexcycle as part of a larger strategy to sell ebooks through ABA member sites, and let consumers access their purchased books through the ABA’s iPhone app. Yesterday the blog Follow the Reader posted an interview with the ABA’s web content coordinator Matt Supko in which he discussed the plans prior to the sale, noting that “further down the road, we’re planning to integrate ebook purchasing directly into the [ABA iPhone] app as well.”

Other questions abound, among them: Will Amazon now support ePub and more broadly will Stanza go forward with the previously announced plan to license PDF and EPUB rendering technologies as well as support for Adobe’s eBook content protection technology?

On that point, Adobe’s Nick Bogaty says “whether Stanza ships a new version with support for PDF, EPUB and Adobe DRM via the Adobe Reader Mobile SDK and adds new catalogs based on OPDS to their “shipped” version of Stanza is still to be determined and is now a decision that is up to Amazon. This is the same SDK that companies like SONY, PlasticLogic, iRex, Bookeen etc. have already licensed from Adobe and this allows consumers to read protected (and unprotected) PDF and EPUB files across devices and from multiple points of purchase.

He recommends, “It would be a very opportune time for publishers to strongly suggest to Amazon that Lexcycle shipping the SDK would be in their best interest.”

But also, what does this mean for free books on the iPhone operating system, since half of Stanza’s titles were free and their “business” was really a platform that effectively served “almost exclusively free books” as Neelan Choksi said at the TOC conference? And will publishers do anything to take an active role in shaping the terms and players of this emerging landscape?