Stanza now downloadable for the iPhone and Touch: ePub among formats readable
Stanza, the iPhone/Touch app that reads the ePub standard and a bunch of other formats, is now online via the iPhone App Store. Thanks to Hadrien Gardeur of Feedbooks for the tip—he’s already noticing an increase in ePub downloads.
So when will Sony come through with ePub capabilities for the PRS-505? Can’t wait for ePub readers on Android-OS phones as well, and there’s talk that Stanza will be on those phones along with FBReader at launch.
The ballyhoo
Lexcycle’s Stanza description: "…Store and categorize hundreds of books in the organizer, choose from thousands of free books available in the Lexcycle Online Library, and transfer books you share from your computer using Stanza Desktop. Your entire summer reading, your class syllabus for the whole year, or all the reference material you will ever need: all at your fingertips. Literally."
Speaking of Android: Google said it would not do a separate device. So it’ll be interesting to see if the TechCrunch report is indeed on target. I have no idea who’s right here.
And speaking of Google and E Ink: What if Google designed specs from an E Ink device and offered the equivalent of Amazon Whispernet, so a bunch of vendors could take advantage? I agree with Hadrien’s observation, in this context, that Google "likes to be in the middle." Meanwhile, please, Google, do the ePub act!
July 13th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
The same questions as for eReader the other day:
How long does it take to start Stanza (and open the last book where you left it)? Can you have it running in the background, and if so, how long does it take to switch to it? Is it possible to display text without anti-aliasing? How long does a page turn take?
July 13th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
Marcus, excellent questions. I’ll at least give you the perspective of a Touch owner after mine arrives and I install Stanza. Same for eReader. Or maybe others can answer before I do. Thanks. David
July 14th, 2008 at 1:09 am
With the caveat that I’m not a huge ebook reader and can’t compare it to a standalone ebook reader, I’ve had a chance to play with both eReader and Stanza on my touch (16GB, used mostly for listening to music and the occasional web browsing - before the App store arrived anyway.).
eReader is, well, eReader. Other than the current limitation of requiring access to a Fictionwise bookshelf to d/l books (A drawback if, like myself, all of the ebooks you could read with it are local to your PC) it just works. The example books included just pop up. Sure, the planned future features sound great but it works now.
Stanza is problematic, IMHO. Sure, you can access a number of online free ebook sources but you have to run an application (the desktop version of Stanza - currently Mac only and free only while in beta) to copy anything to your touch/iPhone. (It comes with one book at this point - H.G. Well’s Time Machine)
I copied a book to my touch from one of the d/l libraries - a translation of Don Quixote. It works… but it takes at least a minute to load that book. Expect longer if you’ve changed the default font size. (I suspect it’s rendering the whole book at that point.). Expect the same kind of long wait if you switch from portrait to landscape mode (and back). Expect the same long wait if you decide to change the font size WHILE reading it. Expect the same wait if you switch from Stanza to something else and then back.
I suspect part of this is related to book size/format so YMMV in respect to actual wait time.
But once the book is loaded — it works. Tap left or right to change pages, top or bottom to reveal the menu bar.
Personally I prefer the eReader ’swipe’ method to turn pages - it feels more book-like.
July 14th, 2008 at 1:20 am
Oops - a correction/clarification to my previous comment - I left out a few words - you can’t copy anything ELSE (from your PC, or other Stanza supported non-d/l library source) to an iPhone/touch unless someone on a local Mac is running the Stanza desktop software. Granted, it’s not the only iPhone/touch application with a similar requirement…
July 14th, 2008 at 5:34 am
[...] Touch over the weekend (and *man* it took a long time). But this morning, after a newsflash from TeleRead, I downloaded and installed the (free) Stanza iPod application from the iTunes store, which is [...]
July 14th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Can’t eReader use books from my local computer? Seriously? That’d be completely unacceptable to me!
July 14th, 2008 at 11:43 am
I’ll download this when I get home and try it out!
… iTunes App Store is blocked at work
July 14th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
@Andy
In both Stanza’s and BookShelf’s defense (the other popular one that requires synching through a desktop application), the problem is that the iPhone SDK has very limited options for synching content to your application. Given that, they’ve taken the approach that I’ve been considering for ADE which is to set up a server on a desktop to synch with (outside of the iTunes synching model). Hopefully Apple will get around to opening up the synching model for 3rd party developers so we can do something a bit more graceful.
@Marcus
The eReader folks admit that they do not have in all the features that they want, and will be adding more in a short timeframes. (See Steve’s comments http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2008/07/13/review-ereader-and-bookshelf-app-for-iphone/#comment-166987 on the earlier linked to story
http://www.teleread.org/blog/2008/07/14/ereader-vs-bookshelf-app-two-iphone-e-reading-apps-compared/ )
@David
Is there are good way for adding external and internal links in the comments?
July 14th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
Oh man, I was all excited when I read the post, then I read the Comment about its slooooowness. I hope it’s still a big work in progress, but putting out something that tries people’s patience is asking for a *lot* of good will up front! What happened to being able to d/l *directly* to the app wirelessly?
How big is that Cervantes ebook?
July 14th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
@Jim
Thanks for the links!
In one of them it says Bookshelf has a feature to “lock the accelerometer from recognizing the phone is in landscape mode”, so does that mean the phone normally goes into some “landscape mode” when you turn the phone that way? If so, is there any way to disable that awful “feature”, because I use my phone a lot in bed (e.g., checking my email (to know if I have to get up), reading, checking the weather, or what food the restaurants near work are serving today, etc.) so I’d hate for the phone to rotate everything the wrong way when _I’m_ in “landscape mode” myself.
July 15th, 2008 at 9:14 am
@Mike
Cervantes book size? There isn’t any way from inside Stanza to tell that I can see. It’s the Edith Grossman translation from Project Gutenberg [Ebook #996]. (Project Gutenberg says it’s a 2.24MB text file but I can’t tell what format it’s in in the Stanza Library where I found it (but it does have an image for a “cover” so I suspect it isn’t the straight text of the original Gutenberg ebook).
(Okay — looks like it’s possibly a format issue as I earlier suggested — I just grabbed the Feedbooks version of Don Quixote (translated by John Ormsby) and Stanza handles THAT one much better/faster. No real startup wait. Stanza is usable in this case and the happiness other people are expressing over using it is understandable.)
July 15th, 2008 at 10:34 am
@Andy
I might have one explanation for this. Was the first version formatted using a single XML flow ? The Feedbooks version is divided into multiple flows.
July 15th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
@Andy: Ah, OK. I thought the Cervantes you’d gotten was from Lexcycle/Feedbooks! That’s why I found the slowness odd. Glad to hear it turns out to be a geeky file format thing.
July 17th, 2008 at 9:07 am
[...] under CommonsWare | Tags: ebooks, epub, iphone, ipod touch, kindle | TeleRead has a post up about Stanza and other ebooks/ebook readers being available for the iPhone/iPod Touch 2.0 [...]
July 17th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
– Marcus Sundman
The iPhone landscape thing works like this. Regardless of your orientation, the phone senses when you are holding the screen in a vertical position or in a horizontal position. It automatically orients the “top” if the image in the display so that it is correct for the way you are holding the phone. It’s actually quite handy.
In addition, switching to landscape mode activates some “landscape only” features, depending on the app you’re using. For example, iTunes goes into coverflow mode so you can flip through your album art, in the browser, flipping sideways gives you a much wider view of webpages, making them easier to read, and if you need to type in a box (like this one) the keyboard appears and is as wide as the screen. The onscreen keyboard is acceptable in vertical mode, but it is a joy to use in horizontal mode.
Turning off this aspect would be a mistake, in my opinion. I would much rather read a 3″ wide column of text than a 2″ wide column. Seems like it would cause less eyestrain.
July 17th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
@Hermitcrab
So how am I supposed to use the phone when I’m in bed, and my head is horizontal, if the phone then rotates everything so that the text is at an 90 degree angle from my point of view?
I’m all for having a landscape mode, but I do NOT want such a thing forced upon me when I don’t want it. Seriously, it’s an absolute deal-breaker for me.
January 3rd, 2009 at 8:57 pm
People should be aware that the Stanza desktop app does not fully support 64 bit Macs (e.g. basically everything Apple has sold for a few years) as I’ve found out and as noted in their faq: http://www.lexcycle.com/node/58. It makes it very impractical to get documents you’ve already got into Stanza on the iPhone. No Thanks.