I have some experience creating iphone applications and would now like to create an iphone book application. Browsing the Book category in iTunes it seems to there is a standard format for building these apps, however, googling for how to build an iphone book app produces no useful results. This type of application is also not addressed in any of the iphone development books I've seen.
Is there a standard method fot building these book applications? Or is it simply copying the text is some format (pdf, txt, html?) and then writing a document handling api? It seems there already must exist apis for doing this. Can anyone point me in the right direction. Thanks in advance!
The upcoming standard format is ePub. See http://www.epubbooks.com and others. It is supported by Adobe and Sony. There is a very nice free ePub book reader for the iPhone/iPod Touch, called Stanza. From Stanza you can open books from websites. Or you can download them through a corresponding desktop application on your Mac. There are thousands of books available in this format, both paid and free ones.
Adobe InDesign supports production of ePubs. There are also some free applications but the ones I could find are not yet mature. There are also some online tools. See the stanza website (how_to_create_epub) for an overview.
Stanza has been bought by Amazon which of course has a competing format, so you never know what they will do to it. But even when they withdraw it you can be sure that someone else will develop another application for it. As ePub is based upon XHTML it shouldn't be difficult to build such an app.
You see some book apps with built-in reader but I think it is wasteful to include the same app in every book. I don't know enough about iPhone development, but maybe some shared Framework can be installed. But why reinvent the wheel if you have a good one already and your new wheel would probably inferior to what is there already?