TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Stanza 1.9: Book annotations, new page turning animation wrinkle, and improved OS3 compatibility

By David Rothman

The new Stanza 1.9 e-reader app—for the iPhone and iPod Touch—offers book annotations.

Fancier page-turning animation and better iPhone OS3 compatibility are among the other goodies in the just-released version.

What’s more, Hadrien Gardeur at Feedbooks says CSS support is better. The worst feature—this is Hadrien speaking, I don’t have Amazon’s side—is “censorship on all books with subject set to Sexuality in the online catalog.” True?

Trying the search function in Stanza’s multicatalog mode for the word “sexuality,” I found oodles of titles, but maybe I’m missing out on some metadata details.

Annotation tips

Back to annotation. To annotate, just tap the target word associated with your entry. In the same motion, hold your thumb down against the word. You’ll see a white-on-black screen if you’re in the default color scheme.

Next select the word where the annotation will go, if it isn’t marked already. At the bottom of the screen, hit Annotate, then make your entry—if need be erasing the word or words that the annotation feature might have picked up by default. Then hit Save, and you’ll be back in your text. You can modify existing annotations by—within the regular text—doing the same tap-and-thumb motion.

Glitches

One problem with the annotation feature is that the yellow highlighting may not show up well against the basic white background. Look closely at the second shot and you’ll see I annotated “hanged,” toward the bottom of the screen. But the annotation is harder to notice than it should be. Perhaps a different background color would help. Meanwhile I’d also welcome easier, faster annotation—Mobipocket’s approach is much, much slicker.

All this aside, Stanza’s annotation capability is definite progress! Kudos to Amazon’s Lexycle subsidiary for this feature.

Page turning and OS3 changes

As for page turning, I think the sideward swipe is working better on my iPod Touch than I remember it. But I could be wrong. I’ve set things up so I can move to different pages by either swiping them or tapping the left or right of the screen. if nothing else, Stanza now includes a new animation somewhat like Eucalyptus’s.

I don’t know all the aspects of the OS3 compatibility, but I can pass on word from Lexcyle’s Web site that “we don’t yet support copy & paste; we are considering adding support in the future.”

Stanza compared to the new Barnes and Noble eReader

So how does Stanza compare to eReader—including the new Barnes and Noble incarnation?

No comparison, for my purposes. With Stanza, I’m not irritatingly whipped from the main app to a Web browser. Stanza overall leaves eReader and its cousin in in the dust, whether it’s the extent of customizability  or the number of font selections

When, oh when, will eReader add the Aerial Rounded MT Bold font—for those of us who want extra-high contrast between text and background, one way to improve readability and also allow dimmer LCD settings than otherwise? I’ve begged eReader/Fictionwise to do this.

This said, I much prefer eReader’s overall treatment of its customers and content providers over Amazon’s oft-disgraceful performance (especially in the DRM area and e-book standards areas). I’m rooting for eReader to catch up technologically. Meanwhile eReader fans are welcome to tell me why, for them, Stanza isn’t as good as their own choice.

Interestingly, at least for now, until Amazon or B&N ends the fun, Stanza can read even DRMed eReader books, at least those bought from Fictionwise (I don’t know about those from the B&N store). I’d rather not deal with DRM, but eReader’s system is far less obnoxious than Amazon’s. Bottom line is that if publishers stubbornly insist on DRM, I can presently get the best of two worlds here—an amazing app in Stanza and the least irritating of the major DRM systems in eReader’s.

Coming? Shared annotations?

So what’s next in Stanza? How about shared annotations or at least the ability to transfer annotations to your desktop machine easily or at email them, as one user has suggested? Stanza already picks up dictionary definitions via the Net, so perhaps shared annotations would not be that big a deal.

Ideally annotation sharing could happen via a standard approved or drafted by the IDPF. Pre-Amazon purchase, Lexycle’s people showed an interest in these matters. Meanwhile shame, shame, shame on the snailish IDPF for not drafting or embracing a shared annotations standard. Anyone at IDPF paying attention to the ePub Interoperability list, whose members have been interested in such matters? Among them, for now: Marc Prudhommeaux and Neelan Choksi—yep, the same guys who sold Lexcycle to Amazon. I hope Jeff B’s people will not be so rude as to force them to leave or turn into Amazon shills.

The future of Stanza

In the wake of Stanza’s acquisition by Amazon, I’m just wondering how long Lexcyle will be allowed to continue developing the product in the same ways and to the same extent it has. Will Amazon phase out Stanza in favor of the Kindle app for the iPhone? Or maybe develop both? In Jeff B’s place, that is what I would do, giving consumers a choice.

Potentially, we’re talking more than books here. The same multicatalog capability that Stanza uses for accessing different public domain and commercial book sites could potentially be used for product categories and other classes of information within Amazon.

Of course, that still leaves open the touchy question of how long Amazon will continue to allow noncommercial collections such as Project Gutenberg to show up.

The good news is that Amazon’s Orwellian debacle last week drained its reservoir of corporate goodwill to the point where it may be just a little harder to engage in anti-consumer behavior in other areas.

From a Stanza user’s perspective, the above would be great. I dearly love Stanza, am delighted that its developers are richer than before, but do worry about its fate. In the ideal world, which this definitely isn’t, Bezos would turn the Stanza coding over to nonprofits to let them develop it for accessing public domain and Creative Commons content. Simultaneously he could maintain some control of the coding to exploit Stanza commercially while keeping it out of the hands of competing retailers.

Related: Tweets about the new Stanza.