There was some buzz in the lit-bloggy-verse a little bit ago about eReader coming out with an ebook reader for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Let me tell you why this is not a big deal.
eReader's software only reads one ebook format, Palm Doc or "pdb", which was originally developed for the Palm Pilot. As an aside, the help section on the site unhelpfully calls this the "Doc" format, which is confusing since for most people "doc" refers to files with the ".doc" extension, that is, Microsoft Word files. I suppose eReader didn't want to confuse people who might think that the format only works with Palm Pilot, but I think it would have been a much better idea to simply explain that the format originated on the Palm Pilot. As it is it might confuse people into thinking their eReader software can read Microsoft Word documents.
Anyway, the eReader store only offers eBooks with DRM, which is typical for Palm Doc files. (Typically the only way to get a Palm Doc file without DRM is to make it yourself.) I once bought two ebooks like this to read on my Palm Pilot. One was an essay collection, the other a long novel I never finished. Now they are useless to me, because to read them I have to input my old credit card number as an "unlock code". I haven't had this credit card in years. No matter that I paid real money for these books, no matter how much I want to reference that essay collection or finish reading that novel, I can't. The books I bought are useless to me, in striking contrast to, say, physical books, which when paid for can be reread and reread to one's hearts content. (And if I didn't want to be able to reread the books, I would have just gotten them from the library in the first place.)
I will never buy another book in the Palm Doc format, or any other format crippled with DRM.
This shouldn't be a problem. More and more eBooks are being offered in non-DRM'd format, specifically, as reliable, old PDFs. What we need is a proper PDF reader for the iPhone/iPod Touch.
Of course, the iPhone/iPod Touch can already read PDFs. There are, however, two major problems with the way it does so. One, it can only read PDFs that are emailed to the device or that are on a web page, and it can't move those PDFs into the file system for easy access, meaning in the case of web page PDFs one has to be online to read them at all. Two, even more critically for eBooks, the PDF reader can't bookmark pages.
So this is what we need: the ability to transfer a PDF from the computer to the device's file system and the ability to bookmark pages. Solve those two problems and you will have (finally) turned the iPhone/iPod Touch into the ebook reader we've all been waiting for.
And if nobody makes an ebook reader like this in July, when the iPhone/iPod Touch App Store is unveiled, I may just make it myself.