We did a fairly extensive rundown of eBooks for the iPhone/iPod touch in August; you can take a look back if you're new to the eBook universe for Apple's mobile devices.

BookReader [iTunes Link] , a US$4.99 app for devices running OS 2.21 or higher, has just joined the crowded eBook market -- but it brings little to the table to recommend itself. The app when first run looks beautiful. You are shown a wonderfully rendered bookshelf which looks very similar to the one found in Classics [iTunes Link], but a bit more nicely rendered, showing the spines of books instead of covers in a scrolling list.

Impressive, but now what? I really had no idea since there were no instructions on how to operate the app either in the app, or on the Readdle site. This, as I've often said, is a major downfall of many of the apps in the store. It would be fine if it were an adventure game, but not at all acceptable in something offering utility that you would like to get at quickly.

The only documentation in the app is a cursory explanation of one of three methods of getting content into the app -- connecting via Wi-Fi and WebDAV to your computer in a fairly arcane manner. You connect to an external server and provide an app-created numeric password. From there you can add books to the server folder... or so they say, but they don't go as far as saying how. I added books to the server, and they never showed up in the app. I was left stranded on the Wi-fi access page and didn't know where to go from there. Now I know that I'm missing something minuscule, but that's exactly my point; there wasn't enough given to me to allow me to complete the task.

The second method of acquiring content is through Readdle Storage. You need to set up an account on the Readdle site which gives you a free 512 megabytes; larger amounts of storage are available for purchase. Once you set up an account, it works fine, but unless you know what to do, you may not find it on your own. You can easily add documents to Readdle Storage and they do show up in the app.

Many documents, unfortunately, don't look very attractive. Anything that started as a .pdf document winds up looking like garbage since all the graphics are gone, and the formatting is stripped out. The list of formats that BookReader handles is also lacking. It doesn't understand some very popular formats such as Kindle, MobiPocket and Microsoft Word's .DOC as do other apps such as Stanza [iTunes Link]. DRM is not supported, but that's par for the course in the eReader market.

Well, Merlin, you did ask.

Having listed some imaginary iPhone apps he'd like to see, Merlin Mann asked the world: "What's the iPhone app you crave?" Hmm, let me see now - I've got a little list.

• Avant Go: A fantastic portable newsagent, in which you could download whole chunks of your favourite magazine and newspaper web sites for offline reading. I used to read dozens of articles in Avant Go on my train commutes in and out of London, back in the days when I commuted. It was an absolutely essential app and I'm very much looking forward to it - or something similar - arriving on iPhone.
• Yojimbo or Notational Velocity for iPhone: See yesterday's rant. If this, or something like this, isn't right round the corner, I shall eat my router.
• TextMate or Bean: This is dependent on Apple opening up Bluetooth to other devices in a future software update. If I could use a full-size external keyboard to quickly write text, I'd want a decent editor to write it in.

What iPhone apps are you craving? Let us know in the comments.