Some big news dropped yesterday in the e-reading world: Amazon acquired Lexcycle, makers of Stanza, the popular (and, dare I say, best) reading software for iPhone. I’ve used Stanza for months now and have read about half a dozen books and other works on it. I was as skeptical as everyone else about the ebook thing, but my iPhone is now my go-to reading platform. Stanza started out good and has only gotten better.

Big wins for Stanza: integration with several e-text sites via API, the ability to read just about any format you can throw at it, and ad hoc downloading of any file from a URL (you can also pull down a file from your hard drive by opening it in Stanza’s bare-bones desktop app). Obviously, it can’t read DRM-locked files, so all those books you bought for your Kindle are so much garbage to Stanza.

Not to be outdone, Amazon released its own reader for iPhone, named Kindle after its pricier hardware cousin.

Big wins for Kindle: access to the entire Kindle store (which I like), and syncability with your Kindle hardware (which I don’t have, but wish I did).

I love Stanza, but I did try Kindle, since 1) it’s free and 2) the real Kindle isn’t. I bought Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon on the Kindle store (you can’t do it from inside the Kindle app; you have to use the Web site) and got about five percent through the book before missing Stanza so badly I bought the non-DRM edition from Fictionwise (which you can do from inside Stanza on the iPhone).

So what is Amazon going to do with Stanza? Though there is precedent for Amazon offering DRM-free content, I can’t see them offering competitors’ titles for sale right alongside the Kindle Store, can you? I think the best we can hope for is a beefed-up Kindle app with some of Stanza’s sweet user interface features, like low-light mode, screen orientation control and the iPod-like book browser.

Those things are all wonderful, but for me, the discovery of new content right inside Stanza is key. I published stories to Feedbooks and Smashwords. All those Stanza users can find my stuff right on their iPhone, and I can find other independent writers to connect with and support.

The worst possible outcome would be the end of free (as in speech) titles in Stanza. I really hope Amazon isn’t just out to eliminate the little fish, throwing out the nascent indie fiction market with the bathwater.

I would love the best of both worlds: a reader that can read any file you own, in any format, in addition to the vast Kindle catalog. But I’m not holding my breath.

I’m hoping that Amazon is really interested in Stanza’s desktop app, and its sharing feature. I’d love an ebook answer to Delicious Library, or iTunes (Cory Doctorow’s on-point rant notwithstanding). I’d love to have a desktop application that organizes my content and can push it to my platform of choice, keeping my place in sync everywhere.

I’m looking in another direction for that, though.

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