What is the most successfully secretive public company you can think of? My vote would go to Apple. Just take a look at the huge frenzy of interest and speculation they managed to create around the development and release of a new mobile phone model. Admittedly, the iPhone from Apple is something quite special in its way but any one of a dozen other companies would give up a lot to be able to attract half as much attention as they did for a new product release. How many other new phone models have already been announced this year and how excited did you get about any or all of them?

Apple doesn’t like us to know what they’re doing until they’ve done it and are ready to put it on the market the day they announce it. Can ebooks on the iPhone be far away? The device is, among many other things, a masterly handler of files and ebooks are nothing but a special form of file. PDF files are natively handled by the iPhone already and that’s established as one of the preferred formats for ebooks. Maybe all that talk about needing the perfect convergence device for an explosion in ebook interest and readership will become moot when one day soon, a million people discover that they’re already carrying that mythical wonder-device in their pocket and use it dozens of times a day for everything from browsing the web, handling email and listening to music to answering the phone.

Which is why HarperCollins is wooing iPhone users. Here’s the Boston Herald story and here’s what Mac News Network (MacNN) has to say. I could give you plenty more links but you can just Google “HarperCollins and iPhone” and see what several dozen media outlets have to say about the one major publisher with a commitment to ebook publishing to those iPhone owners who might think about checking out how interesting an ebook might be.

- John