John Stewart experiences frustration with his iPhone

iPhone this, iPhone that —everyone in publishing is captivated by their new iPhones lately, and by the idea that this — this! — is the new book, and they can’t talk about anything else except for maybe the condition of their IRAs. But the bold new launch of one of the first massive promotions of iPhones as e-readers got off to a less-that stellar start over the holidays, as Edward Nawotka observes in this Publishers Weekly report: “On December 23, ScrollMotion released the first batch of its widely anticipated e-book apps for the iPhone, starting with titles such as Twilight and Eragon. Within 24 hours the company had pulled them from the iTunes store due to security issues.” The problem — “a flaw in the encryption,” according to the director of ScrollMotion’s e-book program, Calvin Baker — has some serious implications. It means that major iPhone e-book programs launched by some big publishers (Random House and the Hachette Book Group), well, they “lost out on the post-Christmas rush of iPhone and iTunes owners fillling their new gizmos with data.”