A few thousand copies of GQ magazine in iPhone form won't turn Condé Nast around. But it's a start, and it's a good bet that the company's first Apple tablet apps will look awfully similar.
Questia Library Plus iPhone app. Credit: Questia We'll spare you the obvious "there's an app for that" joke. But you can get a library's worth of books on your phone. Questia, an online research portal for students, announced its application today for reading books, articles and periodicals on an iPhone or iPod Touch. The app costs 99 cents for 5,000 public-domain books and a week of unlimited access. After that, users can buy a two-week subscription for $9.99. There are so many things wrong with this we don't know where to start. For one, students don't like to buy things....
iBooks. The iBooks app that originally appeared on the iPad is now available for the iPhone as well. That includes a new capability to read any PDF files, and iBookstore integration. You only have to buy a book once and it's available on all your iOS devices. iBooks will automatically sync your place, bookmarks, and notes
Kindle for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad can now display embedded video and audio clips for Kindle e-books, courtesy of the latest upgrade to the app. Read this blog post by Lance Whitney on Digital Media.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Verizon Wireless is due to start selling Apple Inc's iPhone next year, bringing an end to AT&T Inc's role as the exclusive service provider for the blockbuster
"Stanza, a book reading application offered in Apple's
(nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) iPhone App Store since July,
has been downloaded more than 395,000 times and continues to
be installed at an average rate of about 5,000 copies a day... In other words,
Apple may have inadvertently sold more e-readers than any
other company in the nascent digital book market. ...
I found this article interesting because I think the e-reader debate can be made in terms of the different technologies. And something to consider for any of you interested in purchasing one or the other.
"Back in October, the startup tech firm Silent Circle ruffled governments' feathers with a "surveillance-proof" smartphone app to allow people to make secure phone calls and send texts easily. Now, the company is pushing things even further-with a groundbreaking encrypted data transfer app that will enable people to send files securely from a smartphone or tablet at the touch of a button. (For now, it's just being released for iPhones and iPads, though Android versions should come soon.) That means photographs, videos, spreadsheets, you name it-sent scrambled from one person to another in a matter of seconds."
In an age where we can pretty much assume we're being monitored 24/7, is this a good thing? Or is this another tool for some really terrible people to do some really terrible things, but now with an added layer of privacy?