Experimental O'Reilly Ebook iPhone Integration with Stanza

UPDATE: The Stanza integration is no longer experimental. All of O’Reilly’s ebook bundles are now available for sale in the Stanza online catalog.

Back in August, I showed how to read O’Reilly EPUB ebooks on an iPhone (or iPod Touch) using the popular (and free) Stanza reader app. I’m pleased to announce that you can now directly download EPUB ebooks purchased from O’Reilly on your iPhone to Stanza. The integration is experimental for now, as we iron out some kinks and work to make our own site more iPhone-friendly.

These instructions assume that:

To download one of your O’Reilly ebooks to Stanza, follow these instructions (if you’re reading this post via RSS, you may need to click through to the original post to see the screenshots):

  1. On your iPhone (or iPod Touch) open Safari and go to http://members.oreilly.com

    mm_signin.jpg

  2. After signing in, navigate to the Electronic Media tab.

    emedia_tab.jpg

  3. If you zoom in, you’ll see that among the download options, there’s now a “Stanza ePub” button. Press the button to begin downloading (to scroll the list of titles, use a two-fingered vertical drag — again, this is experimental, and we are working on a better iPhone UI).

    stanza_button.jpg

  4. Pressing that button will open Stanza and download the book.

    book_downloading.jpg

This kind of integration was simple and straightforward in large part because many of the moving parts around Stanza are based on open standards, including EPUB and the Atom Publishing Protocol (both successful and important XML standards that publishers should be paying attention to — find out more at January’s StartWithXML forum in New York).

Thanks to Marc Prud’hommeaux at Lexcycle for working with us on the integration, and to our own Nick Pilon for connecting the plumbing on our end. Marc will be talking about Stanza and about reading on the iPhone at February’s TOC Conference.

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