I started a little adventure recently. One which I mentioned lightly a little while ago, and that’s my trek into the e-book world. I have bought a nice Sony e-book reader and so far I’ve been pretty happy with the purchase. But what just happened today has got me a little miffed about how open of a platform e-books can continue to be. To be honest one of the reasons I bought the Sony was how open it was. I can dump almost anything on it and nobody can take the stuff away or turn off my account. The ability to tell me I’m not allowed to read something (like can happen with the Kindle) just isn’t an issue (mostly) with the Sony. But today, the chances of this nice open world for e-books and their readers just got a whole lot smaller.

Lexcycle has been acquired by Amazon.com!
Mon, 04/27/2009 – 13:00 — marc

We are very excited to announce that Lexcycle has been acquired by Amazon.com!

It has been an amazing experience to see Stanza grow out of our brainstormed ideas into one of the most downloaded iPhone applications. Throughout this period we have attempted to listen to and innovate for our customers to provide a great ebook reading experience.

We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition. Customers will still be able to browse, buy, and read ebooks from our many content partners. We look forward to offering future products and services that we hope will resonate with our passionate readers.

We are excited to join forces with a company that has innovated on behalf of readers for over a decade and is a pioneer in ebooks. Like Amazon, we believe there is a lot of innovation ahead for ebooks and we could not think of a better company to join during this exciting time.

As always, we encourage people to ask questions or provide feedback through our forums at http://forum.lexcycle.com or directly to us at info@lexcycle.com.

Best,
Marc, Neelan and Abe

So I’m wondering where the purchase of LEXCYCLE by Amazon is going to lead Stanza. I mean lets be perfectly honest here, there’s very little to gain by Amazon from leaving Stanza alone. So, I see this going one of two ways:

1.) Is Amazon going to roll the Stanza application (desktop & iPhone) into their existing Kindle infrastructure… ie. take the desktop app, the ePub technology and toss the rest away or

2.) Is Stanza going to gain the ability to read the .azw format and purchase books OTA from Amazon?

What do you think? Can this possibly be good for the e-book industry?

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