Publishers and retailers around the world are looking for ways to easily distribute their works to the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. Stanza for the iPhone and iPod Touch provides support for commercial eBook content, provided that the files can be distributed without the encumbrance of Digital Rights Management (DRM). Major publishers, such as O'Reilly and Pan Macmillian, are distributing many of their books without DRM and are finding that the benefits in terms of ease of use far outweigh the copy protection that DRM providers dubiously purport to enforce.

This page provides technical instructions for getting electronic books downloaded from a publisher or retailer onto a purchaser's iPhone or iPod Touch. Booksellers are encouraged to take any of this information and reprint it, in whole or in part, on the help pages of their web sites.

Transferring books downloaded to a PC to the purchaser's iPhone or iPod Touch

The easiest route (from the standpoint of a bookseller) to get purchased books for the seller's site to the purchaser's device is to have them download the book to their PC using their existing e-commerce setup. The purchaser will then launch Stanza Desktop (which is available as a free download for Mac and PC at http://download.lexcycle.com) and open their book. Stanza Desktop supports all major electronic book formats, provided they are unencumbered with DRM. A full list of the supported formats can be found at http://www.lexcycle.com/supported-formats.

Once the book is loaded into Stanza Desktop, they can share it with Stanza iPhone/iPod via their WiFi network, as described at http://www.lexcycle.com/faq/how_to_get_books_onto_stanza_iphone.

The advantage of this method is that it doesn't require any technical work on the side of the bookseller (aside from ensuring that the book is DRM-free), since the existing book download mechanism on the site will remain the same. The disadvantage is that the user must first install the Stanza Desktop software and perform an extra synchronization step to transfer their books over to their device.

Enabling direct downloads of books to the purchaser's iPhone or iPod Touch

The aforementioned method for getting books onto Stanza iPhone/iPod is perfectly valid, but it can be cumbersome for users, since it requires the installation of additional software and adds an extra synchronization step to transferring their purchased books onto their device. An easier alternative is to provide the means for a user to find, purchase, and download the book into Stanza, all from their iPhone or iPod Touch.

The first requirement for using this method is to provide a download option for the book in the ePub format. ePub (also known as Open eBook) is the only open industry standard for eBooks, and is supported by a wide variety of software such as Adobe Digital Editions, Mobipocket Reader, and FBReader. If your books are not already available in ePub, you can find a variety of tools and tips for converting your books into that format at http://developer.lexcycle.com.

Once your books are available for download in the ePub format, you can allow users to install them directly into Stanza iPhone by providing a link to the book from your site's "My Purchases" section. In order to direct Safari to install the book directly into Stanza, the link needs to start with the "epub://" protocol. For example, if the URL for a book is available at:

http://store.mybookstore.com/myaccount/mybooks/somebook.epub

To make that link launch Stanza, you would specify it as:

epub://store.mybookstore.com/myaccount/mybooks/somebook.epub

When the user taps on that link in Safari on the iPhone/iPod, Stanza will be launched, and the book will be downloaded and installed into the user's library, and will then be available for reading. Note that the user must already have Stanza installed for this link to work, so you will want to provide a piece of descriptive text directing the user to install Stanza (possibly by just pointing them to http://iphone.lexcycle.com).

Caveat: The epub:// URL will be downloaded from within Stanza, not from Safari. This means that any cookies that are used for authentication from within the browser will not be used when downloading the book. The best solution to this limitation is to implement a time-limited URL that is presented to the user. An example of such a URL might look something like:

epub://store.mybookstore.com/myaccount/mybooks/download.php?book=somebook.epub&expire=2008-09-01

That way, Stanza will be able to download the book directly, but links to the books will expire after a certain period. Of course, in the example above, you would want to implement support for encrypting or obfuscating the expiration parameter so that the link couldn't be shared between many users.