Amazon has acquired Lexcycle, a startup that developed Stanza, a free e-book application designed for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. As of January, the application had been downloaded more than a million times since appearing on Apple’s App Store last July.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Amazon’s Kindle2 retails for $359 on Amazon.com. More than 260,000 books are available on Kindle.
On March 4, Amazon introduced a “Kindle for iPhone and iPod touch,” a free application available from Apple’s App Store.
Stanza currently offers about 50,000 titles from partners like the Fictionwise eReader store, now owned by Barnes and Noble, and another 50,000 free books for sources like Project Gutenberg and Feedbooks.
Stanza has been a proponent of open eBook standards like EPUB, while Amazon has always kept its system relatively closed, notes Read Write Web. Lexcycle has also been working with Adobe to develop an open standard for eBook catalogs. This new standard, the Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS), will be built on top of the Atom Syndication Format, and aims to create an open standard for distributed online catalogs for electronic books.
