ZDNet’s Jason Perlow has done a thorough job lining up the various e-reading apps available for the iPad and iPhone. His review covers:

• Apple’s iBooks
• Amazon Kindle for iPad
• Barnes and Noble eReader
• Kobo Reader (which is also the Borders eReader and will soon be the Whitcoulls eReader for the iPad)
• Ibis Reader (this is interesting because it’s actually an HTML5 web app rather than a native iPad/iPhone app)
• Stanza
• vBookz (actually a text-to-speech reader app rather than a traditional e-reading app)

Among Perlow’s findings:

• Apple’s iBooks is the flashiest but “of all the reader applications we’ve looked at, it is actually the least functional. Apple designed iBooks to behave and act like a real book, and focused more on the aesthetics and UI than actual App functionality with the initial release.”
• Amazon’s Kindle wins in terms of the size of its 600,000-title ebook store but “from a feature perspective, the Kindle software is pretty weak when compared to its hardware counterpart.”
• Interestingly, it’s the Barnes and Noble eReader that wins the highest plaudits from Perlow. “Of all the paid content readers, by far the best one in existence is probably the Barnes & Noble eReader application.” But it’s probably not so useful outside of the US because of its ties to the very US-focused B&N store.
• Of particular interest in this part of the world is the Kobo which will shortly be released in this part of the world as the Whitcoulls reader app. For Perlow, it stacks up pretty well. “It’s extremely polished and very well-designed,” he says.
• The Ibis Reader is different from the others in being written in HTML5. It reads non-DRM ePub files. “Compared to the other reader apps on this list, the reading features within Ibis Reader are pretty spartan. … However, the interface is very clean and simple to use, and the reading experience is actually pretty good when compared to the native apps.”
• Stanza was the original e-reading app that popularised e-reading on the iPhone. It’s the latest to the iPad party but the result is good according to Perlow. “Stanza is by far the most sophisticated e-Reader application for iPad, as it supports not only the open EPUB format but also the legacy Mobipocket, PalmDoc (DOC), Microsoft LIT formats as well as HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word and Rich Text Format (RTF)…. If you have lots of content that you’ve collected over the years, Stanza is definitely a must-have app. There’s absolutely no downside, it’s free to use and does more than any e-book reader app on this list.”
• vBookz is a US$2.99 text-to-speech reader which works only with public domain ebooks  at this stage. Perlow concludes, “vBookz is an extremely interesting and exploitative iPad application, and one which may be good for getting children interested in classic literature and also a useful app for the visually impaired.”

Read the full ZDNet e-reader app review here.

UPDATE: ZDNet has also posted a comparison of ebook reader apps for the Google Android platform. Check it out.

Since the announcement of the iPad, magazine publishers have been scrambling to turn their magazines digital. But there’s one problem: unlike books, which have seen a surge in digital sales,  the magazine industry has no standard format that publishers, e-reading device manufacturers and consumers can rally around.

That looks set to change as an influential magazine standards group, the IDEAlliance, has thrown its weight behind the development of the next generation ePub, the standard adopted by book publishers for ebooks.

Speaking at the Magazine Publishers of America’s Dimensional to Digital conference last week, Dianne Kennedy, vice president of Media Technologies at IDEAlliance said her organisation was working with the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) to bring rich media and magazine content to the ePub standard.

IDEAlliance is the group behind PRISM, the XML standard for magazine and journal metadata.

The book industry’s ePub standard is widely supported by device manufacturers, publishers and distributors.  Convergence with the magazine and newspaper industries would make a lot of sense for publishers, consumers and device manufacturers.

While ePub currently lacks some features that are important to magazines, its general approach based on XML and web technologies including HTML and CSS is very sound. Combined with its widespread support among device manufacturers and industry heavyweights Apple and Google, it offers a good foundation for digital magazines.

The standard will also be developed “with an eye to advertising”, says Kennedy, another key feature for magazines.

The working group hopes to have the first draft of a standard published by September 2010.

Among the 14 goals that the IDPF’s working group has identified for the next ePub specification, currently designated ePub 2.1, several are particularly important to magazines:

Need for rich media and interactivity support.

Need for enhanced article support. The fundamental atomic unit of magazines and newspapers is the article … it is desirable to support a work flow where PRISM content can be delivered as EPUB.

Need for a means to convey page-level layouts and target multiple display surface sizes in a single publication.  … This is a barrier to supporting books with more complex information designs, as well as digital magazines …

Currently there is no mechanism to identify and include advertising in publications, which is required in several markets.

For more, see this article from eMedia Vitals.

Apple’s grip on the media business tightened this week with the release of its latest operating system update for the iPhone OS4. And as its mobile product line expands, its operating system has dropped the “Phone” from its name to become iOS4.

iOS4 is a free upgrade for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPads. It’s rumoured that another platform will be eventually added to the iOS family when Apple uses it to revamp its unsuccessful Apple TV set-top box.

Of note for publishers:

• Apple is talking up its iBookstore as the third store platform, following the original iTunes and the App Store. It claims that, among the large publishers who’ve supported the iBookstore since launch on 3 April, sales through the iBookstore now represent 22% of their ebook sales.
• The iBooks e-reading app has now been ported to the iPhone and iPod Touch.
• The iBookstore now operates wirelessly, no PC required, and will syncronise your ebooks across multiple Apple devices. This includes your ebook library, the place you’re at in the ebook you’re reading and — a new feature — your bookmarks and annotations.
• iBooks now reads PDFs as well as ePub formatted ebooks. This will make it useful as a reader for business documents as well as adding what is still a popular ebook format and might serve as a useful interim “quick and dirty” format for illustrated books and textbooks.
• On the hardware front, a new iPhone model was announced which will improve the reading experience with a higher resolution, 960 x 640,  327 pixel per inch display and an extended battery life.
• iOS4 will also see the launch on 1 July of Apple’s mobile advertising platform, iAds. iAds will open up a new source of income for app developers, potentially opening advertising to any of the quarter of a million apps. Apple will take 40% and return 60% to developers. In a show of strength, it signed up US$60 million of A-list advertisers to support the launch, a figure Apple claims is half of the entire projected mobile ad spend for the second half of 2010. One neat feature will be the ability to launch web ads from an in-app browser so that the user remains inside the application when viewing the advertiser’s website rather than being taken out of the app to launch the Safari web browser.

Finally, in what is becoming an unfortunate pattern in Apple’s announcements, a revised developer agreement takes aim at potential Apple rivals, locking them out of the App store. This time, Google appears to be the target with its competing mobile ad platform, AdMob. Google beat Apple this week by releasing the SDK (software development kit) for its in-app mobile advertising for the iPhone and iPad. The trouble is, in a move reminiscent of its ban on Adobe’s Flash platform on the eve of the iPad launch, Apple just changed the terms of its developer agreement, making it unlikely that any app developers will be able to incorporate AdMob ads without risking being banned from the App store.

More on the launch: See the Techcrunch summary of key points from the iPhone and iOS4 launch.

Amazon has just split its ebook top 100 list into a Free and a Paid list, giving much more useful insight into what people are buying and reading digitally.

To me, the most interesting thing is it shows is that the classics — the traditional fare of free reading — have some serious competition from new works which, for various reasons, authors or publishers have chosen to distribute free.  (Not quite free: they’re subject to Amazon’s US$2.00 WhisperNet charge for international downloading). You have to look towards the end of the list to find a high concentration of the traditional classics.

A lot of these free titles, of course, are self-published and there are quite a few from established authors that have been offered as promotions. It’s a great way to get recognition and cut-through: launch as a free ebook for a limited time then switch to paid, or sell more hardbacks and paperbacks.

For those who want to see the new Kobo eReader in action, take a look at the video review I’ve just done for bookTV.nz. Kobo eReader is the ebook reader that Whitcoulls is now selling through its stores and website to accompany the opening of its ebook store.

If you want more, you can also read my recently posted review.

And while you’re at it, head over to this page and sign up to follow bookTV.nz. Or you can go straight to the bookTV.nz YouTube channel. Plenty more good video book reviews and author interviews there and more coming.