As you can imagine I was one of the people grinning from ear to ear yesterday as Lexcycle went public with their announcement that they have partnered with Fictionwise. As you know, I’ve always had my eye on them as their reading app for the iPhone, Stanza, looked set to be one of the best and most popular of the many e-reader apps right from the start. And it was not long after the App Store launched that we decided to pursue a partnership with them, which was announced last week.
All along though, we have said that to break into the big time an iPhone reading app would need to be integrated into a cross-publisher ecommerce platform to enable browsing and purchasing of new, in-copyright books direct from the iPhone. With this partnership, Lexcycle has achieved just that at the same time as developing thr capability to accept encrypted files as well as non-encrypted ones. At the same time, Fictionwise has just won some brownie points and given itself an exciting new story to tell publishers.
I hope Amazon pricked up its ears at the news, too. The eReader ebook reading format which Lexcyle has licensed from Fictionwise to enable this is an interoperable Reader that can be used across many devices. So this is one big point for open standards and interoperability. Nil points to the walled garden, proprietary route, if you ask me.
Kudos to our friends at Lexcycle. This is potentially game-changing. A big step towards mobile reading.
One Comment
Great news from Stanza, I’m just loving their little app. One thing that I don’t like the sounds of: “eReader ebook reading format which Lexcyle has licensed from Fictionwise…” Oh, dear. a licensed, not opened, format?
I think big publishers keen on really succeeding in the ebook space should insist on open formats. Otherwise you’ll be unnecessarily limiting the spread of ebook reading. What’s PanMac’s opinion on that?
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[...] commenting on the deal, Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan (another recent Lexcycle partner) hoped that Amazon might learn a [...]