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]