I do a lot of reading on my iPhone. It's a high quality display, and text is quite sharp. The backlighting means that I don't need an external light source, the touchscreen means it's quiet and it's awfully convenient to be able to have a constant source of reading material, without needing a WiFi signal, on a device that I have with me pretty much all the time, and that fits in a pocket. I thought I'd describe some of my favorite iPhone (and iPod Touch) readers. All of the following applications are free, though not all the books for the applications are free. I'm assuming that you are using the 2.1 or later software on your iPhone or iPod Touch. All of them may be downloaded either via iTunes or the App Store application on your iPhone.

The first reader I used on the iPhone was one I'd been using for years on my Macs and on my Palm PDAs. There are versions of eReader Pro available for a lot of devices [3], including lots of cell phones. It allows you to download books from eReader.com [4] and Fictionwise.com [5]; both are owned by Fictionwise. You can read books in landscape or vertical mode, choose font, type sizes and styles (the standard Web fonts are all supported), line height and justification, even a "theme" for the pages.

Within eReader Pro, you can do most of the things readers do to books besides read them; doggear pages, highlight passages, add notes, follow hyperlinks in books, look up words in a dictionary, store a number of books on your iPhone and categorize and sort them in a variety of ways. You can download books you've purchased using a Web browser and stored at the eReader or Fictionwise servers using your iPhone and WiFi, or via iTunes. On the iPhone the eReader Bookshelf lists books you've purchased; you can download them with a tap. You can also delete books from your iPhone without deleting them from the server. Fictionwise books must be in either "Multiformat" or "Secure eReader" format to work; they will not show in the Bookshelf if they will not function in eReader Pro.

You can set your personal Navigation preferences, but the abilities of the Touch screen are fully exploited; you turn pages, and access settings, by gestures. A horizontal flick of the finger to turn the page, a vertical flick to toggle the controls and access settings display on and off. A slider at the top of the page allows you to navigate the book spatially; the icon of the open book at the bottom of the page lets you navigate by chapters. The Books button at the top left lets you display your categorized and sortable list of locally stored books.

You can create your own e-books [6] to read in eReader Pro; it's also possible to set your iPhone to download books from sites other than eReader.com and Fictionwise, or upload books from your computer [7] to your iPhone. There are free books available here from eReader.com [8] and here from Fictionwise [9].

Another free reader application for the iPhone that I'm very fond of is Stanza from Lexcycle [10]. You can download it from their Web site and then sync your iPhone, or use the iTunes Apps store. There's a desktop version too, for Mac and Windows. [11] Stanza has integrated links to several catalogs of free books as well as commercial e-book publishers; you can download them directly to you iPhone from within Stanza, or use the free Stanza Desktop application to download them from your computer. One of the integrated links is to Feedbooks [12], a site I'm very fond of, that offers legal versions of books by SF authors Cory Doctorow, Charlie Stross and Peter Watts, as well as lots of classic literature [13] in a variety of languages.

You should note that the screen shot shows a dimmed screen; the page is far more readable, usually. The UI is a little difficult at first, since it's gesture based; a tap in the center of the screen brings up several icons, including the familiar gear for Settings, and a bar like the one in eReader for navigating within the book spatially. You can touch an icon of an open book to create bookmarks, and navigate within pre-set bookmarks for chapters. The Settings include options for setting fonts, themes, navigational gestures, and cover image, as well as categorizing the book by collection and subject. You can also search the text of a book. Once you enter the settings mode by tapping the center of the screen, you'll notice an arrow at the top left of the screen; that takes you back to your list of "Latest Reads," and from there, you can go to the Library, which includes locally downloaded books as well as the various options for downloading more books. There's a short movie showing Stanza in action [14].

Note: a number of the commercial ebook sites sell ebooks with DRM; this is true of both Fictionwise and eReader.com. The DRM is tied to the credit card and name used to purchase the book. You can download the free books without having a credit card, but you will need to have an account on the site in question.