The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

"but no mention of the fact that Amazon bought a whole company in order to gain those new features."

yeah, they bought all of lexcycle just so they could reverse engineer stanza to figure out how to change font color and make it so tapping the screen changes the page.

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It's not about "figuring out" how to do something.

Do you really think it would be perfectly kosher for Amazon.com to just go ahead and build specific features that exactly match those from Stanza (say, tapping left/right to turn pages, middle to bring up controls) and not expect some form of lawsuit? I mean, I don't know anything about Lexcycle's copyright/patent status, but seriously dude. This is what Microsoft has done for decades, and Apple does it too. Are you a big company who wants something that a small company built? Buy the company!

Besides, "all of Lexcycle" consists of "Marc, Neelan and Abe."
http://www.lexcycle.com/lexcycle_acquired_by_amazon

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Ummm... Stanza is not the only reading application on the iphone and it wasn't even the first. eReader has had tap to turn a page for the past 10 years at least. Heck Amazon also owns Mobipocket which also has that "innovative Stanza feature" of tapping to turn a page and has had it for at least eight years. Changing colors in reader applications has been available since the first color PDA was released. Amazon doesn't need to aquire another company to add these common features.

Stanza is nice, but you're giving them far too much credit for innovation. I don't get the fanboy reaction it gets from its users. The only Stanza feature I thought was brilliant was the page brightness hack. Otherwise it's at about the same level of usability and feature set (or even below) as a half dozen other reader programs which have been around for far longer.

This update is simply Amazon making a couple small changes to help increase usability. It has nothing to do with their aquiring Stanza...

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First, let me count the strawmen:
1. 'Stanza is not the only reading application on the iphone and it wasn't even the first'
2. 'Mobipocket […] also has that "innovative Stanza feature" of tapping to turn a page'
3. 'Changing colors in reader applications has been available since the first color PDA was released'
4. 'you're giving [Lexcycle] far too much credit for innovation'
5. 'I don't get the fanboy reaction [Stanza] gets from its users'

Second, you make a good point: "This update is simply Amazon making a couple small changes to help increase usability. It has nothing to do with their aquiring Stanza..."

You're absolutely right. I'm sure it's just a simple coincidence that Amazon acquired Lexcycle — a company which offers only one product — and then made the first feature-update to Kindle.app just over three weeks later. And it is a further coincidence that the only four features in Kindle.app 1.1 are exact implementations of features that reside in the one product that Lexcycle ships.

Sheer happenstance.

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Great! I'm glad you agree with me.

Like any software development company, Amazon has a feature roadmap for their product and planned for feature upgrades over time. They didn't just release the first version of Kindle for the iPhone and then all go on vacation. They certainly didn't buy Stanza for their special knowledge of tapping the iPhone screen or setting font colors.

Books.app was released one month after the first iPhone was sold-- a year before the Apple App Store opened. It allowed users to tap the screen to turn the page. If you tapped the center of the screen you would see the menu. Again, these are not features specific to Stanza. Bookshelf was released the first day of the App Store. It featured tap to turn the page and tapping in the center of the screen would show the menu. And yes, both of these allowed the user to change colors to a sepia theme-- something that is actually more reminiscent of the original Microsoft Reader look and feel. There aren't any patent issues on any of this stuff-- it all predates Lexcycle. There's prior art. These are standard features of a reading application on a portable platform.

The purchase of Stanza was to acquire another method of delivery for electronic books. There's no evidence that any special technology was transfered from Stanza to Kindle for iPhone. Amazon has kept Mobipocket running as a delivery mechanism even after they released the hardware Kindle and after they've released the Kindle for iPhone. Amazon is also keeping Stanza operating as a separate delivery method.

Stanza has a deal with Fictionwise in which Lexcycle receives a percentage of sales referred from Stanza. This makes a third mechanism for Amazon to sell electronic versions of books and allows them to remain a part of one of the largest distributors of ebooks-- Fictionwise/eReader (which was just purchased by Barnes and Noble).

Amazon has made it clear in their physical sales that they don't care if they control the entire process as long as they still make a profit on the sale. Buy.com is a competitor of Amazon, however Amazon realized that they could make almost as much profit by just letting buy.com sell the product and pay referral fees. They aren't so much in competition any more as in coopetition.

There is more evidence that the Kindle for iPhone application has roots in the Mobipocket development team. The Kindle format is almost identical to the mobipocket format except for a couple DRM bits which were swapped.

The Mobipocket team announced that their iPhone application was completed and would be released last summer. Amazon asked them to delay releasing the application and then Mobipocket promised it would be released by the end of 2008. It looks like this application was either canceled or more likely morphed into the Kindle for IPhone which was released a couple months after Mobipocket's promised release date.

It is unlikely that Amazon bought Lexcycle, integrated those members into their team, brought them up to speed on their software, had them write the code, did their QA on that code, submitted it to Apple and waited for their approval process in just three weeks. Software development doesn't work that way.

So, follow your arguments:

1. Amazon bought the company to gain software features-- no, they didn't. They bought Lexcycle for the distribution network, publisher relationships and built in user-base.
2. Amazon needed to buy the company because Lexcycle patented changing color themes or tapping in a specific area of the screen.-- No, these aren't patented by Lexcycle, are not unique to Stanza and are prior art going back before the release of Stanza and the iPhone.
3. Amazon needed Lexcycle developers to implement the Kindle for iPhone application-- No, Amazon already has a development team which had been working on the iPhone application AND the Kindle application. This team is familiar with the specific Kindle wireless functionality and created the book format. This team has also programmed reading applications for eight other platforms.

And I've now successfully procrastinated getting back to work for 15 minutes. Thank you for the argument, I think I needed that-- it was fun. I bid you good day, sir. I said good day!

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Glad you got what you needed.
http://xkcd.com/386/

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