As Jane men­tioned on her blog the other day, there’s a new update of firmware that will allow third party apps to be used on the old iPhone (old?) along with the launch of the new 3G iPhone. I can’t wait for her review of this mod­i­fied second gen­er­a­tion iPhone. I have no plans to upgrade. Aside from that, I do apol­o­gize to those read­ers who could care less about the iPhone and all the hype it has cre­ated. How­ever, it really is nice to extend the func­tion­al­ity of your iPhone to read ebooks along with every­thing else that it does.

I went to the mall yes­ter­day and saw a line that was a mile long out­side the Apple store. That was just to get inside the store. Sup­pos­edly, the iPhone is being acti­vated in the store and already there are reports online stat­ing that some stores were not able to acti­vate the iPhone on the new 3G net­work. Well, I upgraded by installing the new 2.0 update to my old iPhone and it feels brands new. Oh, the reason why I went to the Apple store was to get a new case for my phone but picked a bad time to do it because they no longer carry the old iPhone cases or any­thing related to the old iPhone. Really stupid move, IMO. Moving on. Well, the new ebook apps that are avail­able for the iPhone are nice but they are still lack­ing in functionality.

eReader. First up is the eReader app for the iPhone. DRM on this format is unlocked by a credit card, too. The books ren­der­ing on the iPhone is nice but there are no arrow but­tons to touch to turn the pages, no high­light­ing func­tion that I could find and you can only book­mark chap­ters (unless some­one can tell me oth­er­wise). You can also increase font size, change font family and search text but that’s it. Edited to add: if you down­load a dic­tio­nary, it will allow you to look up words that you may come across in the story.

Edited for clar­i­fi­ca­tion: the ereader soft­ware does sup­port not only the iPhone but Palm OS, Pocket PC (2002 or later) and so on and so forth. I clearly need to proof­read my writ­ing before sub­mit­ting. Sorry if this caused con­fu­sion. What I was want­ing to say and did so - very badly - was that I don’t think that I would like to commit to this format because it is very lim­it­ing and DRM on it is not very user friendly. The down­load­ing of these ebooks are fairly easy once you have access to your library. Just input your Login ID and pass­word for your account - I have Fic­tion­wise - and you have imme­di­ate access to your library. You can scroll through your books and down­load them to your iPhone individually.

Book­shelf. This was the first ebook reader for the iPhone and now it is a paid book app (9.99). It reads mul­ti­ple for­mats for plain text (.txt), .html with images, FictionBook2 with images (.fb2), Palm­doc (Apor­tis), Plucker with images and non-​DRM Mobi files. The shelf­server didn’t work for me out of the box. I had to follow the instruc­tions at the web­site to get it work­ing. Once you’ve launched the shelf­server, you should be able to add a direc­tory by brows­ing through the files on your com­puter. When I launched the shelf­server I received a warn­ing that it didn’t com­plete so I had to unin­stall Bon­jour (which is used as a dis­cov­ery device) and re-​install it from iTunes and launch the shelf­server again. This time it worked.

Once ren­dered, it really isn’t all that impres­sive BUT the fact that you can read almost your entire library on your iPhone is enough for me. Hope­fully more fea­tures are coming soon like scrolling as I didn’t see a scroll button and if you’re able to increase or decrease the font, as yet I haven’t had that work and you are able to change the back­ground and change font family and book­mark. Jane should have a more in-​depth review coming for these apps and hope­fully more stuff to share on her new 3G iPhone. As for me, I like my orig­i­nal iPhone better actu­ally. I saw and held the new one - it feels feather light and uh plas­tic. Edited to add: you can increase the font by select­ing a numeric value with the accom­pa­ny­ing font family. I really miss that scroll button and I still haven’t fig­ured out how to book­mark yet.

But you know, once the iPhone apps really get going, we should see some good stuff come the Fall. Hope­fully, there will be more book apps or updates to make the iPhone the one phone to use for every­thing. Even­tu­ally, the day will come when most ebook read­ers will be saying, Kindle what?