TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Now Available: iPhone iSilo

By Chris Meadows

Edit: Well, that was fast. iSilo is now available in the iTunes store for $9.99. Looks like I covered it just in time. (Thanks Guillermo, pstjmack.) I will review it when I have time; in the meanwhile I have bumped this article up to serve as notification.

It looks as though iPhone e-readers will soon have a fourth choice, at least if they are willing to do their own e-book conversions.

iSilo and its desktop sync app iSiloX were e-reader applications from the early days of Palm. Their big claim to fame was providing hypertext-style linking between articles, as no other Palm readers were set up to do that at the time.

Back when I was using a Palm, I did not like the MobiPocket Palm reader, as I felt it was too slow and wasted screen real-estate with its wide side margins. So, I used to use iSilo to load my Palm, Visor, or Clié with Baen e-books.

All I needed to do with iSilo was point iSiloX at the "toc" file from the Webscription with a link depth of 1, and it would create a perfectly-formatted e-book for me. I could even plug my Clié in to act like a USB drive and have iSiloX automatically save the files to it so I would not have to sync them.

I was not the only one using iSilo, either. Blackmask.com (now Munseys.com) used it as one of their automatic conversion formats, so all new books showed up in iSilo in addition to their other formats. And apparently a significant number of medical and legal references use iSilo, too.

It’s not too surprising when you think about it. Both professions place a high premium on being able to look things up, and iSilo was the only portable hypertextual format available when the Palm first really hit it big. Even now that other such formats are around, enough references have been in iSilo for a long enough time that there is a considerable amount of inertia.

Well, tonight I discovered that iSilo will soon be coming to the iPhone.

PDA medical site the Palmdoc Chronicles has learned from the iPhone section of iSilo’s forums that an iSilo for iPhone has been developed and is waiting on Apple’s approval for release through the App Store. Although the app itself is not available yet, iSilo has not only released some demonstration screenshots, but has also put up a user manual and a guide to transferring documents to the iPhone via HTTP (since there is no user file sync conduit for the iPhone).

In one post to the main ongoing thread on the iPhone forum, the iSilo administrator says, "We can’t say specifically yet what the price will be, but we do plan on debuting iSilo for iPhone with an introductory promotional price."

It might be worth keeping an eye out for that price break. The iSilo client for the Palm generally cost around $20, and it did not have to worry about Apple claiming 1/3 of the proceeds.

Of course, it is quite possible few people outside of the medical and legal professions will care about Yet Another E-Reader that only reads PalmDoc and its own format, and Zachary Bedell’s website mentions plans for adding iSilo file support to a future release of Bookshelf. Still, for doctors or lawyers planning to replace their PDAs soon, this could be pretty big news—and it’s an interesting reminder that professionals don’t always have quite the same e-book needs as the rest of us.