Filed under: Business, News, iPhone
Amazon buys out Stanza, may improve Kindle software
Just a couple of months after launching its Kindle app for iPhone, Amazon.com has acquired LexCycle, the company behind a popular free eBook reader called Stanza. Besides removing some competition, Amazon now has the potential to use Stanza's features to improve its own software. For its part, LexCycle doesn't plan on changing Stanza just yet, and its content partnerships are still in place.While Amazon pushed its proprietary Kindle book format, Stanza has supported open eBook formats like EPUB. Stanza has a library of over 100,000 titles, coming from Barnes and Noble's eBook store, O'Reilly and Project Gutenberg, among others. It's really not obvious what Amazon gets out of this deal if it decides to discontinue Stanza. Readers who were using it only for free books are unlikely to switch over to the paid-download scheme of Kindle unless it incorporates a lot of Stanza's most appealing features.
[via ReadWriteWeb]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Victor Agreda Jr said 10:01AM on 4-28-2009
I really hope Amazon doesn't kill it. It is very annoying to have to ignore even one app update in iTunes...
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Erik Ellison said 10:10AM on 4-28-2009
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
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David said 3:20PM on 4-28-2009
What if Amazon bought them simply to incorporate their massive library into the Kindle's portfolio? Adding 100,000 titles is a good way to stay ahead of the iPhone and Sony in the electronic reader space (okay, I'm sure there's a lot of overlap, but even 20% would be big).
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koehler83 said 12:00PM on 4-29-2009
I wonder if this will mean Stanza will no longer be available in Canada, as Kindle has never been made available here.
Amazon.ca is a pathetic shadow of it's US counterpart.
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