iLounge.com released this weekend the new edition of the much-praised, much-downloaded online-only The Free iPod + iPhone Book.

Now on its fourth edition, it features everything you need to know about iPods, iPhones, iTunes and Apple TV in a 270-page book that can be printed out nicely if you don’t care about trees and nature. Speaking as a Mac user and magazine editor, this is one of the few titles I’d actually pick up from a newsstand and buy if it wasn’t already free and downloadable. Excellent and informative. The Doodler gives it high marks.

To get it, click here so that The Free iPod + iPhone Book 4 gets loaded onto iTunes for subscription, and you won’t have to worry about missing it and other iLounge Library online publications.

After the Zinio freebie deal for the iPhone, there’s even mo’ better reading available for Mac users.

The NY Times released the beta version of the Times Reader for the Mac a few days ago. It’s a good standalone offline reader, and I get mileage out of it on the occasions when that sneaky wifi signal is hiding from me. I can now just read the newspaper, so to speak.

The Times Reader is an app that runs well on its own without the help of a browser, downloading and formatting the day’s issue in a clickable faux newspaper layout. Being a beta, it has its quirks. Mine has the irritating habit of zapping back to the first page of an article when you try to read beyond the first page. It’s an intermittent glitch though. Another niggle I find is that you can toggle a 7-day archive of past issues, but of the four days of downloads I’ve had so far, I can only access the current newspaper; the past few days just seem to disappear. (Maybe I’m just doing something wrong.)

The sections of the paper are aligned on top for quick access. So you don’t get lost wandering in all the verbiage, it helpfully grays out articles that you’ve already read, and if you’ve ever tried reading the New York Times, that’s an awful lot of text indeed, and a gray-out feature like that is really useful.

The only part that doesn’t sit well with me is that it insists on installing Silverlight, Microsoft’s plug-in that is its version of Flash or Quicktime. I try to keep as much Microsoft off my Mac as possible (with the exception of Office, which I can’t seem to wean myself from no matter what I do.)

No offense to my mothership, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, but this newspaper is worth a daily look. All you need is the Times Reader app beta, internet access and a NYTimes account (which is free). Heck, you can even do the daily crossword puzzles.

Zinio, that wonderful source of online versions of your favorite magazines, is field-testing (or as they say, “incubating”) The Zinio Mobile Newsstand, a service made specifically for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, and makes use of the graphics and multi-touch features of these gadgets.

At the moment, all you need do is head on to zinio.com/iphone on your device to get full, free (for now, otherwise it’s US$5 per issue), hi-resolution and fully readable copies of your titles.

Available ones include Popular Mechanics, Car & Driver, Men’s Health, Playboy, Penthouse, Esquire, PC Magazine, Popular Photography, Elle, Technology Review, Reader’s Digest, Macworld US and Macworld UK.

Read them while they last! (And if you know how to tweak Safari to pretend it’s an iPhone, you can read these mags on your Macs as well, in full desktop mode. Heh.)

UPDATE: I’ve gotten more questions about how to tweak Desktop Safari to pretend it’s Mobile Safari for iPhones than is comfortable, so here’s the secret, once and for all: Go to Safari Prefs/Advanced and check the box to enable the Develop menu. Then go to Develop/User Agent and select Mobile Safari iPhone. Have fun.

We all know the feeling. Hearing that great song on the radio that you’d give up your Mac to remember the artist and title. Or come across this great new song playing in someone’s car or in the mall that you’d give up your iPod to know the name of. Well, these days all you’d really need is your iPhone, a wifi connection and Listen.

TUAW’s Erica Sadun, lead purveyor of free crazysexycool apps and utilities for the iPhone has come up with with another winner.

Imagine you hear that mysterious song somewhere with wifi, and you happen to have your iPhone. Fire up Erica’s Listen, put your iPhone near the audio, wait a few seconds, and you get the artist, title and album the song came from, right on the multi-touch screen. Sounds too good to be true.

Listen samples five seconds of audio, then goes online to consult a database, matches the sample to the music and spits back the song info. Is that crazysexycool or what?

I used it in the office today, and people went oooh and ahhh. Granted, it doesn’t catch everything. It caught maybe three out of every five (it’s still a beta, after all), but sample a reasonably popular song and it’d get it every time. And it’s not really a new idea - there are cellphones with this sort of feature out already for a while now. But hey, who cares? This one’s sure to make it into the Doodler’s Top 10 Favorites for 2008.

The Listen beta is available for your iPhone via Installer beginning today.

One of the most tepid, dishwater-weak and featureless of the built-in Apple apps for the iPhone is the barely functional Photos app. Even the cheapest digicam or cam phone has more features than that one.

Well, someone’s finally done something about it and made a somewhat-free and more capable photo app. It’s called Camera PRO for iPhone, and offers a few shoulda-been-in-the-box features for free (and some not so free).

Considering that it’s just a matter of time before Apple beefs up their own software in a future update, these entrepreneurs from Amsterdam are striking while the iron is hot and is charging for additional “Premium” features. Some are in numbered trial mode, and others yet to come (including a send-to-Flickr feature).

Rather than take time explaining the app to you (and because they say a picture is worth a thousand words and I’m still too sleepy to type much), I just screen-capped the welcome screen on my iPhone, because everything’s there anyway:

It works, too. Here’s a shot I took using the default no-choice settings:

And using the zoom feature of Camera PRO where I didn’t move the iPhone:

Focus seems to be a problem still, but hey, anything’s better than what we got now, right?

V. 1.04 now available via Installer.