Melville House Books

Turning the page in the Eucalyptus reader

How to make book into a hit: Get some lunkhead to ban it. Of course, in this instance the book — the Kama Sutra — was already pretty much a hit. But then, as this as this MacWorld report details, Apple went and banned its ebook app for the iPhone and the ancient text got to be a hit all over again in a whole new format never dreamed of by it author — that would be Nandi the Sacred Bull, of course — never dreamed of.

And now that Apple has unbanned the app in question — the Eucalyptus reader — “serious readers can rejoice,” says Ben Boychuk in this MacWorld report. “Eucalyptus is really, really good. It looks and feels the way  Amazon’s Kindle app should but does not.”

So what’s so good about it? “Eucalyptus by Things Made Out of Other Things is a client for Project Gutenberg’s library of nearly 30,000 titles ….  The experience is as close to that of a real book as the iPhone will allow. You flip pages rather than scroll vertically or horizontally. The pages resemble paper. After awhile, you almost forget you are reading on a screen.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.