When it comes to digital book readers, the iPhone and iPod Touch are gaining ground against the Amazon Kindle. Forbes reports that mobile-phone-based applications like Stanza are leading the ebook race in a telling market:

"According to Paris-based Feedbooks, Stanza's largest distributor of content, the application's users have downloaded more than 2 million books. By comparison, Kindle users who access Feedbooks' book catalog--directly via multiple methods, including through its preinstalled Web browser--have downloaded less than 40,000 of Feedbooks' titles, although they also have wireless access to the company's contents."

If you want to sample some of that winning content, Feedbooks has a special Banned Book list--just in time for Banned Books Week festivities. That list includes George Orwell's classic 1984. That dark novel is the most popular book on Feedbooks, followed by The Art of War--these are gloomy days, even in ebooks. (Via TeleRead)

Digital copies of 85 percent of Swedish bestsellers are already accessible on illegal download sites; and, according to TeleRead, a few experts speculated that book pirates are headed towards the good ship Kindle.

Recently Peter Sunde, one of the creators of the popular download site, Pirate Bay, requested an Amazon Kindle for mysterious purposes. Some worry that the Torrent pioneer has nefarious plans for digital books. One blogger writes:

"I really think we are going to see the napster of books - sooner or later ... I personally think that the Kindle edition books are already lower priced. There's little justification for piracy if you're getting books at nearly half the price of a print edition."

Also, keep TeleRead author David Rothman in your thoughts as he recovers.

Based on an informal email survey last week, the majority of GalleyCat readers who use the iPhone or iPod Touch to read digital books are using the Stanza application as their platform.

With that growing audience in mind, we caught up with Neelan Choksi, Chief Operating Officer at Lexcycle, the company that produces the most popular book reading application at the Apple Store--outlining what the company can offer the 325,000 "possible users" who want to read content on their phones.

"I think many people are not aware that they can pair up the Stanza Reader (for the iPhone/iPod Touch) with Stanza Desktop to upload other reading materials; for example, Word files, HTML files, unreleased books. See the following review as an example of that. We are offering some non-book content on Stanza currently, like daily news, magazine articles, and serialized novels," he said.

More after the jump...

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It's 2:30 pm. Do you know where your poets are?

Poets have always struggled for recognition, fighting small print runs, an indifferent reading public, and the general impossibility making a living with poetry. Worst of all, most people don't even know where to find poetry when they need it.

Over at the Poetic Asides blog, Robert Lee Brewer is compiling a meta-directory of poetry event listings around the United States. Want poetry? Use this highly scientific Poetry G.P.S. to find a reading near you. Start in New York. Head to Chicago. Then go south to Atlanta.

Check the crowded comments section for more directories from other cities, including Pittsburgh and Dublin. (Thanks, Practicing Writer)

Last week, Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg (left) went to a launch party for Luxid 5.0, billed as "a collaborative solution for analyzing and process strategic information," and at that party, he heard Elsevier Health Sciences technology officer Mirko Minnich talk about the evolution of online publishing from a single-website model to a cross-platform model to a new wave of "applications that know who you are, what you're trying to do, where you are in the process of doing it, and then providing appropriate content to help you do it."

Well, that got him thinking about the book publishing industry:

"It wasn't the only time I heard talk of 'improving the return on content assets' during my week in New York City. The fact is, most publishers have huge collections of valuable content and there are nearly innumerable ways to get value from it with a combination of imagination, re-use, re-purposing, and customer-centered—as opposed to content-centered—design."

Put it another way: Content isn't king, the customer's experience of that content is. And Kellogg raises an interesting question concerning the pricing of that experience: "Will we irrationally persist in paying $50 for something that buries us in information instead of ideally $75 for just the bits we need (paying a premium for the time savings) or at least perhaps $10 for just the bits we need (thinking that we're not using the whole book, just a bit of it)?"

His examples rely heavily on nonfiction models, but here's another scenario, which assumes that what you want to do is enjoy some short fiction: Would you pay $25 for a hardcover short story collection by an author you've never read before? Or $30 for an hardcover that includes one short story by, let's say, Amy Hempel, and ten more stories by writers she hand-selected? Or $20 for a paperback edition of that anthology as opposed to the usual $15? Or $5 for a pamphlet or electronic edition of that Hempel story plus one other randomly selected from her batch of ten recommendations?

mediabistro.com's main site has an interview with Jessa Crispin, the founding editor and and publisher of Bookslut, one of the literary blogosphere's best-known sites. How does she explain the site's success? It's a matter of sticking to what they do best—commenting on books—on their own terms:

"Once you start chasing the reader, that's when the reader loses interest. There's all this talk about what can we do to capture the attention of a particular demographic, but I think having a conversation is probably the least productive thing you could be doing. I like what we're doing on Bookslut. Our audience likes what we're doing on Bookslut. So I just sort of leave it at that."

As "what we're doing" gains readers while newspaper book review sections continue to fold, Crispin observes:"I'm pleased as punch that the idea of the authority is going away. The New York Times never spoke to me. If you were one of those people who don't agree that Philip Roth is the greatest American living writer, where were you supposed to go to find new books?"

This article is one of several mediabistro.com features exclusively available to AvantGuild subscribers. If you're not a member yet, you can register for $59 a year, and start reading those articles, receive discounts on mediabistro.com seminars and workshops, and get all sorts of other swell bonuses.

Like to eat? Like to write?

On September 24, MediaBistro is hosting a special "Dinner & Discourse with Food & Travel Editors" to discuss how multimedia tools are changing the art of food writing. The guest speaker list reads like a who's who of foodie journalism:

"Dana Cowin, Food & Wine, editor-in-chief; James Oseland, Saveur, editor-in-chief; Michael Boodro, Martha Stewart Living, editor-in-chief; John Rasmus, National Geographic Adventurer, editor-in-chief; Laura Begley, Travel + Leisure; executive editor, Peter Frank, Concierge.com; editor-in-chief."

More details after the jump...

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Old media maven Tina Brown is back this fall with a new website called The Daily Beast. The author of The Diana Chronicles and former New Yorker editor imagines her site as a cross between The Huffington Post, the content aggregating site Digg, and a glossy high-end magazine from the 1990's.

Today, new media guru Jeff Jarvis took a critical look at Brown's new project, but his essay included a couple evocative quotes from the famous editor. Here's something to ponder over the weekend: Brown suggested that writers are being swindled by new media.

"I think this period where anybody thought that anybody could write a posting for a venerable brand is a terrible mistake ... There hasn't been enough pushback from the creative world ... The great con of the 20th and 21st century is the way that talent has been exploited by this technology boom."

There was an interesting post on the Media Shift websiter earlier this week about a defamation case involving BookSurge, Amazon.com's print-on-demand service. Basically, when some teenager in Maine got herself convicted of a hate crime against another cheerleader, the first girl's parents wrote a book about the whole sordid mess and published it through BookSurge, so the second girl sued the family, the freelance writer who'd worked on the project, and BookSurge—who filed a motion for dismissal on the grounds that it was not the "publisher" of the book, at least as defamation law understands and precisely defines that term. And the court agreed:

"Under the common law, whether a participant is deemed to be a publisher for purposes of imposing defamation liability depends on the 'extent to which he participates with an author... of the defamatory statement in its publication,' according to the court's ruling in this case. Actors who are 'more actively involved' in the process may be held liable 'because they have the opportunity to know the content of the material being published.'"

Since BookSurge never really looked at the material submitted for printing, the court decided, it could not be held liable for any defamatory content in that material. And now that the broader case has been settled out of court, this particular ruling stands until some other court rules differently.

About a year ago, there was an item on GalleyCat about authors turning old, unsold manuscripts into free ebooks, with Melanie Lynne Hauser's Jumble Pie cited as a prime example. Hauser emailed yesterday to say that the novel's trackable readership had just passed the 1,300 mark—and, thanks to what she describes as a "lucky accident," more than 60 percent of those readers came this summer. (Not known: How many of those 1,300 downloaders passed the file around to their friends?)

The original banner art Hauser used to promote the free ebook on her website was a simple picture of a pie. ("I'm a writer... what do I know about cover art?" Hauser quipped.) Then her husband asked if she wanted anything from the graphics website where he was about to use up some nearly-expired credits; pretty soon, they had a mock-up book cover that made Jumble Pie more recognizable as a "chick lit" novel, and "the number of readers' requests jumped tenfold," she reports. And a few PR companies have mentioned the possibility of lining up sponsorship for the book, in the form of a new page inserted into the PDF mentioning that the download is free thanks to the sponsorship of... well, whoever the sponsor might turn out to be. (Holy Chris Anderson!)