Comments on: Stanza now downloadable for the iPhone and Touch: ePub among formats readable

By: Marcus Sundman

Marcus Sundman — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:06:53 +0000

@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.

By: Hermitcrab

Hermitcrab — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:19:36 +0000

– 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.

By: iPhone/iPod Touch As An eBook Reader « A Commons Blog

iPhone/iPod Touch As An eBook Reader « A Commons Blog — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:07:37 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Mike Cane

Mike Cane — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:22:15 +0000

@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.

By: Hadrien

Hadrien — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:34:59 +0000

@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.

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:14:36 +0000

@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.)

By: Marcus Sundman

Marcus Sundman — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 02:14:03 +0000

@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.

By: Mike Cane

Mike Cane — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:26:12 +0000

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?

By: Jim Lester

Jim Lester — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:19:15 +0000

@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?

By: Yoda47

Yoda47 — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:43:11 +0000

I’ll download this when I get home and try it out!

… iTunes App Store is blocked at work

By: Marcus Sundman

Marcus Sundman — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:00:28 +0000

Can’t eReader use books from my local computer? Seriously? That’d be completely unacceptable to me!

By: Times Emit: Stanza for iTouch / iPhone

Times Emit: Stanza for iTouch / iPhone — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 09:34:37 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:20:08 +0000

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…

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:09:53 +0000

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.

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 03:36:03 +0000

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