It’s official: The iPhone is more popular than Amazon Kindle. And not just in the obvious categories like listening to music, surfing the net or the other applications where Kindle barely competes. Now, the iPhone is also muscling into Amazon’s home turf: reading ebooks.
Stanza, an ebook reading application offered in Apple’s 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, according to Portland, Ore.-based Lexcycle, the three-person start-up that created the reading software.
The future of speed reading e-books
Stanza, like Kindle, lets users download new content directly to their device. It has a snappy interface that allows readers to flip through a book simply by tapping the edges of the page and responds far faster than Kindle’s poky E-ink screen, which takes about a second to turn pages. And then there’s what some may call Stanza’s unfair advantage: the application is free, as are its many titles.