Amazon Buys iPhone eBook App Stanza

(MoneyWatch)  It's a sign of our times when a small company announces on its blog that it's been acquired by a huge company, and then a New York Times blogger pushes that news out to the large audience always hungry for tech news online, especially when the way I find out about all of this is via a virtual community I recently joined that circulates info via a listserv on intellectual property issues.

Man, news travels fast these days!

According to its own blog, Lexcycle, the company that created Stanza, a very popular ebook application for the iPhone, has been purchased by Amazon.

Amazon reported record profits of $4.89 billion in Q-1, and although financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed, the giant onine discounter certainly has the resources to go on a buying spree at present. From a strategic persective, Stanza allows Amazon to push further into the mobile eBook market, which though still in its infancy is growing much more rapidly than is the traditional book publishing business, which is largely stagnant.

Stanza, which is a free app, enables iPhone users to to access a library of around 100,000 books and magazines. Most of these are in the ePub format, which is emerging as a standard for eBooks, but that Amazon's Kindle has not yet supported.

According to Brad Stone, writing on the Times' blog Bits this afternoon, "The Lexcycle team should also help Amazon stake out ground on Google's Android phones, the Palm Pre and Windows Mobile devices -- and perhaps eventually turn to more open e-reading formats."