Steampunk Tales is one of those iPhone-based ebook readers that I talked about in my last post, with a catch:

Emulating the style of the pulp adventure magazines of the 1920s and ’30s, Steampunk Tales contains first-run, original fiction written by an A+ list of award-winning authors. Issue #1 contains 10 stories, each running between 4,300 to 11,000 words, for the unbelievable price of only $1.99.

I don’t like the font they’re using, nor do I like the parchment texture they use as background for their stories. But I do think that this is good first step for iPhone ebooks – it is, after all, the first indie-original effort I’ve seen on the app store. Kudos to the publishers, next up: a service for non-programming writers to publish to iPhone, perhaps? (thanks, Duane)

[Update]: Received an email from the developers. The reader does offer multiple fonts and backgrounds, which is a relief – the default curly script is barely readable.