Regarding Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus is a new e-book reader for the iPhone, created by James Montgomerie. Content comes from freely available books from Project Gutenberg. The main draw for Eucalyptus is that the user interface is simply exquisite. See for yourself here. Montgomerie sent me an ad hoc beta last month, and the page-turning animation is simply amazing. It’s really one of the most amazing things I’ve seen on the iPhone yet.

But: Eucalyptus has been rejected by Apple, for the absolutely outrageous reason that one of the books you can search for and download from Gutenberg is Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana. Not only can anyone load and read this exact same book on any iPhone using MobileSafari, but it’s also available through other e-book readers already in the App Store such as eReader, Stanza, and Kindle.

This might be the shittiest and most outrageous App Store rejection to date, and that’s saying something.

★ Thursday, 21 May 2009