The mobile phone application developer ScrollMotion finalized deals with Simon & Schuster, Random House, Hachette, Houghton Mifflin, and Penguin Group USA to develop e-books for the iPhone.
According to MobileContentToday, the list of books will include Stephenie Meyer, Philip Pullman, Christopher Paolini, Brad Meltzer, and Scott Westerfeld. The books will be sold directly through the Apple App Store with book-skimming, word-searching, and note-taking functions. In addition, the books are wrapped in iTunes anti-piracy DRM. It joins a number of e-reader applications for the iPhone, including Stanza and eReader.
The post explains: “ScrollMotion would like to see the organization of the app store evolve so that ebooks could be listed separately from other apps like games, and stored on the device in a separate location. This approach, of selling content as an application, suggests a number of interesting ideas: podcasters could create an app that lets users purchase premium content, rather than just giving it away via iTunes. The lines between what is content and what is an application will get fuzzier.”
Update: Maud Newton has an excellent profile of ScrollMotion.