Move Over Kindle; E-Books Hit Cell Phones

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In December, Random House made some of its best sellers available through the iPhone iphoneand iPod touch. A month earlier, publishers Pan Macmillan and Simon & Schuster made their books available for the iPhone through a free application called Stanza, made by Lexcycle. Users download the software to gain access to Stanza's own bookshop, which offers more than 100,000 titles, about half of them free. Lexcycle Chief Operating Officer Neelan Choksi says users are downloading about 40,000 books a day. As is the case in traditional book publishing, romance novels are the most popular genre, he says.

Some books are adapted specifically for the cell-phone medium. Free children's book Buddy the Bus No. 1: There's Always Tomorrow from iOrbi lets users tell part of the story in their own voices. Bible application TouchWord Pro lets users take audio notes and insert bookmarks while reading.

Finding Readers on iTunes

Authors are turning to iTunes to get discovered by readers who might later pay for material. Author Matt McHugh, for instance, used e-book software maker TouchBooks Reader to create a free, iPhone version of his book, Scrooge & Cratchit. "The market is already splitting in two directions: the blockbusters and the indie or niche authors," says Alex Brie, developer of TouchBooks. "The App Store Books section will always be a great place for authors or editors to promote their work through branded or freely downloadable e-books."

Developers and publishers also plan e-books for other smartphones, including Research In Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry, and devices that run Android, a cell-phone operating system developed by a consortium of companies led by Google (GOOG). Lexcycle intends to release an e-reader application for Android in the next three to six months, Choksi says. "Ultimately, we are interested in working with everybody," says Shatz at Random House, which hopes to have 15,000 titles available in the e-book format by mid-2009. "Our job is to help our authors reach the widest audience possible."

Kharif is a senior writer for BusinessWeek.com in Portland, Ore.