Bifocals not included

As Wired reports, an E-Book reader (which I will henceforth call “a device or application that displays digital books,” because the term “E-Book” makes me barf) is now available — legally — for the iPhone.  Called Stanza, it is capable of displaying the text of any book available at Feedbooks, which amounts to “thousands” of titles, mostly public domain and Creative Commons-type stuff.

The good news is, they’re free, and you can download them on-the-go; the bad news is, that’s all the selection you get — digital books from Amazon need not apply.

As some of the commentors at Wired point out (full disclosure: one of them is me), if Amazon plans on keeping their digital book sales confined to the Kindle, someone else — probably Apple — is going to step up and fill the void, selling DRMd digital books through, say, the iTunes store.

This news isn’t exactly shocking … I just thought I’d bring it up because it fulfills the prophesy I made earlier.  Which wasn’t much of a prophesy, seeing as how this application has been illegally available for ages, but still.