As part of my continuing preparations for our upcoming trip to Thailand, I’ve been filling my Amazon Wish List with books that I want to read during my travels. Reading is something I always re-acquaint myself with whenever I’m on the road. Although I like reading and can get sucked into a book for hours on end, when I’m at home, I have a hard time pulling myself away from my family, my work, and my technological toys to spend much time reading.

Not too long ago, though, I re-discovered how much easier it is for me to fall asleep if I spend the last part of my day reading. Because I don’t want to disturb Apple by leaving a light on, I started to think outside the box — maybe I could read stories on my iPhone? After all, the iPhone is capable of opening Word documents, PDFs and such. I found an iPhone application called Air Sharing which lets the phone act as a “wireless thumb drive,” onto which you can simply drag and drop your documents and files. For some weeks now, I’ve been using this as a way to read stories in Word format before dozing off at night.

However, Air Sharing isn’t built with book reading in mind — the text is very small, it keeps rotating the damn screen orientation every time I try to read while lying on my side, and the black text on the glaring white screen is hard on my eyes in otherwise total darkness (even though I turn the screen’s brightness all the way down).

Enter eReader Pro. eReader Pro is another downloadable application from the iPhone App Store, and is the answer to about a dozen questions I’ve been asking for a long time. On top of all that, it’s free.

eReader is, as you might guess, an eBook reader for the iPhone — the premier eBook reader, in my opinion. Unlike the competing application known as Stanza, eReader is capable of reading protected PDB-format eBooks that you can buy from various stores online. eReader themselves, in fact, were acquired by FictionWise.com and have their own massive online library of books you can purchase, including — and this is where I get really giddy — a library of over 600 Star Trek pocket novels, ever my subject of choice.

This afternoon I conducted a test, and purchased two novels in the Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Mission Gamma series. You can buy them right from your phone, download them directly to your eReader Pro “bookshelf,” and open them right up. To verify that you’re the legal purchaser of the book, you enter your credit card number one time and you’re good to go. The best part? These two books I bought are long out of print, and on Amazon’s used book marketplace, the cheapest price you can find them for is upwards of $30 apiece. My total cost for both? Less than $14. Score.

Besides the great library at your fingertips, the eReader Pro application itself is full of options for an optimal reading experience. You can invert the screen colors for night reading (and let me tell you, the white text on a black background is far easier on the eyes in ambient darkness). You can set as many bookmarks as you want, write notes to yourself, highlight passages, look up words in a dictionary (requires a purchased dictionary to be downloaded to your phone), and jump to any chapter in the book. The app even automatically remembers the last page of each book you were reading.

All of this would be great by itself, but I went a step further and researched a means by which I could create my own PDB-formatted eBooks for reading on my phone. I found a free piece of software that lets me create an eBook from any Word document in about ten seconds — I’ve already tried converting some old stories I wrote, and it works beautifully. I love it!

The only thing I wish the eReader Pro application would do is let me categorize my books, so that I could, for example, just see Star Trek novels, or just see stuff I’ve written myself. As it is, all of the books on my phone go into a single list, which I can sort either by title, author, or publication date.

The eReader Pro iPhone App (it also works on iPod Touch devices, by the way) has been around for over six months now, so the only thing I feel bad about is the fact that I didn’t discover it until now! Of course, it’s now easy for me to see why so many people are calling the iPhone (and iPod) the ultimate eBook reading device. It’s just another way in which the iPhone proves itself to be more than just a phone — and worth the purchase price several times over.

And hey, now I don’t have to cart four heavy, unwieldy omnibus editions onto the plane with me.