Stanza e-reader’s desktop beta for Windows: Some glitches, but iPhone-related program is off to a great start
For some days now, I’d been testing the Stanza e-reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
With Kindle-level ease, I could download classics and public domain titles from Feedbooks—everything from Tarzan of the Apes to Edith Wharton’s Summer.
But Stanza lacked a way to bring in files already on my desktop PC.
That’s changed (download here). To the left, you can see how The Solomon Scandals showed up on my iPod Touch.
Word 2002 in style: Just one of many formats supported
Scandals isn’t a finished book, just a Word 2002 file in editing in an RTF incarnation at Twilight Times Books.
But you’ll notice how slick it looked on my Touch when I tested Word 2002.
Stanza was smart enough to detect my chapters, marked only by forced page breaks and centered boldface. Look at the style it assigned the centered boldface I’d originally entered without a font change. As for the unneeded title at the top of the page, I suspect that I could just avoid entering a title within Word’s "Properties" menu. If not, perhaps Lexcycle can make the necessary tweak.
No, Stanza wasn’t perfect—it failed to pick up the italics in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for example. But notice the hyphenation?
I didn’t even have to hook up my HP desktop computer to the Touch. Stanza, like BookShelf, let me transfer books wirelessly.
Mobipocket, ePub and Adobe results
I also tested Stanza with a Mobipocket book, a copy of Dickens’ Bleakhouse hundreds of thousands of words long, and found that importation on the desktop was not instant but acceptably fast. Same for shorter ePub, PDF, TXT and HTML books.
Alas, however, Stanza failed the ePub torture test and could not display Cyril Pedrosa’s Three Shadows. It stopped after a few pages.
What’s more, on both Wowio PDFs (yes, I’ve kept my old files) and others, Stanza generally failed to recognize paragraph breaks.
The quirks of the desktop version
So how about the desktop version? It let me change such basic variables as fonts styles and screen colors, search for phrases and even print.
I could use my mouse wheel to scroll by the line but not the page. Hello, Marc? Care to add that feature. Your program is for more than programmers. That said, the Stanza desktop program intrigues me even without forthcoming additions such as horizontal layouts.
Just a quick spin
As a tester, I’ve barely scratched the surface, given the many formats that Stanza supports, and beyond that, remember this is a beta.
Even so, based on what I’ve seen of both the iPhone incarnation and the desktop reader, Stanza is clearly a program with a future.
Remember, the desktop version won’t just let you read and transfer files—it will even let you translate among formats (though this is a work in progress).
Earlier Stanza made the online Time’s list of favorite iPhone apps. With more polish and proper promotion, it just might turn into a blockbuster within the e-book niche.
Reminder: The desktop companion program also comes in a Mac incarnation.I’d love to hear from Mac owners who’ve used it. Pros and cons from a Mac perspective?
August 7th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
I have high hopes for Stanza, but for the time being I have removed it from both my iPod and my desktop system for the reasons described below.
Since I create my own editions of public domain works, I was primarily attracted by Stanza’s capability to share files between my desktop system and my iPod. Alas, after two releases, I never got this capability to work; the first release failed to establish a connection between the iPod and the desktop, and the second release crashed on the iPod when attempting a file transfer. These are undoubtedly early release problems that will be smoothed over in time, but for now I’ve given up chasing every new release of both the iPod and desktop apps.
Even if file sharing worked, I still have a few bones to pick with the desktop implementation. The first is its “smart” handling of XHTML files, which managed to mangle every one of my homemade e-books it opened. I’m sure I could modify my e-publishing toolkit to compensate for this, but should I have to? The whole point of using a standard like XHTML is to avoid having to customize the content for individual readers.
More irritating is the fact that the desktop implementation of Stanza appears to hijack numerous file types, making itself the default application to be invoked when various files are double-clicked in the Finder. This is reminiscent of Real Player; if I had known this was going to happen, I would never have installed Stanza in the first place. Applications that affect the behavior of other applications should certainly document isues like these so that users can make an informed decision as to whether or not to install them.
It’s worth noting that the way Stanza implements file sharing suffers from the same ease-of-use problems that Paul Biba has written about with regard to the Kindle competitors; before I can read a book on my iPod I must open it in Stanza on the desktop system. Since I’m not really interested in using Stanza on the desktop, having to do so in order to get books onto my iPod is an unwelcome hassle.
All I really want to do is download content to an e-reader on my iPod and have it remain there. I’m hoping that we’ll see an iPod app that handles the transfer via a standard protocol like FTP rather than requiring the installation of a proprietary server on the desktop system. I further hope that the user interface for this app is as well designed and implemented as the Stanza client for the iPod.
August 7th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
I use Stanza on a Mac. I have not been successful in exporting a file in AZW format, but I have been able to open any book that was not copy protected so far. It is very readable. I use it also for books that have nonsensical titles. I open the book in Stanza and then rename the file to match the title. I am still using the beta, but when the program comes out in its final form I will spend the $15 to buy it.
August 7th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Sorry to read about all the problems with the desktop app.
That said, daaaaamn, that screensnap is just gorgeous, Rothman!
August 8th, 2008 at 12:14 am
I use Stanza on a Mac mainly to read Mobipocket files and find to be provide a pleasant reading experience. I do wish that it had automatic bookmarking. I plan on paying the $15 when the beta ends. The Mac version also has problems with the Pedrosa book epub edition.
August 8th, 2008 at 3:30 am
Thanks, Todd, for your perspective, and if we don’t hear from Marc, then jog me and I’ll forward your very useful comments to him.
I myself have enjoyed a smooth connection between the desktop and iPod Touch and have used it to transfer maybe half a dozen books. Perhaps later I’ll encounter problems. You’re using the Mac version, perhaps? Maybe my using the new PC beta makes a difference.
Yes, as long as your XHTML is sound, then you shouldn’t have to baby Stanza along.
Totally agree that apps need to be polite and not hijack file types. Once again, I haven’t noticed the problem so far in the PC version, but will be on the lookout for it.
I might take issue a bit with the “Before I can read a book” stuff. One of the things I like about Stanza is the many public domain titles I can download directly from Feedbooks. It isn’t that difficult, starting from the Stanza Library: Online Catalog > Freebooks by Feedbooks > Most Popular > Title You Want. You could also pick out books in others ways.
That said, it would be nice to have things standardized not just for Stanza but for others program to simplify downloading from a number of sites. Feedbooks’ work is an important step along the way.
Meanwhile it’ll be interesting to see what Marc says, and whether he can change things to address the issues you raise. I suspect he can. Meanwhile we’ll all keep in mind that the program is very much a work in progress and costs $0 for now.
Thanks,
David
August 8th, 2008 at 5:15 am
I have tried Stanza (Windows version) and was unable in my brief encounter to get files from PC to iPhone, though I was of course able to download files from the Internet. At the moment I prefer eReader, as Stanza loses the italics/bold in the sample MS Reader book I converted, which is a big deal in many books where italics is used to differentiate characters, or flashbacks. I also don’t like the aggressive hyphenation that the iPhone Stanza app uses. On a small screen with justification off, hyphenation (IMO) should be used rarely or not at all. Finally, the Stanza app also seems to regularly lose its place in my books, I think visiting the Settings page is enough to trigger a return to the start of the current chapter.
August 8th, 2008 at 10:06 am
For Stanza, at least in the PC version, here’s one reminder.
Under Tools, click on Enable Sharing. I assume people are already doing that—but it’s just the kind of mistake I might take.
You might also want to try reinstalling the Bonjour program.
One other ideas would be to see for the sake of diagnosis if the app works without WiFI security in place.
At any rate keep the observations coming, so I can simply point Mac here and we can get some answers.
Thanks,
David
August 8th, 2008 at 10:45 am
I really wanted Stanza Desktop’s sharing/syncing to work with my iPhone, but it didn’t. Some problem with Bonjour and the pairing in Java. I have loads of ebooks in Stanza already downloaded from Feedbooks, but being able to transfer files from my PC would have taken things just that little bit further. Still, Stanza is not the main offender by far - I had exactly the same trouble with BookShelf and its stab at Bonjour file transfer. And when I tried to reinstall Bonjour, it messed up my system big time *and* didn’t work. Bonjour on Windows seems to have severe issues, and Web-based file transfer implementations, such as eReader’s, or Stanza’s own link to Feedbooks, honestly seem a far simpler and better solution for the iPhone.
August 8th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Regarding my comments above, David writes:
> I might take issue a bit with the
> “Before I can read a book” stuff.
Note that my objection refers only to getting *my* content from *my* desktop system onto the iPod. I agree that Stanza’s ability to download titles directly from the net is nicely implemented. But I’m still waiting for an iPod e-reader that will let me download my own content from my own desktop system without jumping through hoops.
> You’re using the Mac version, perhaps?
Correct. And I’m not running the most recent version of Mac OS, which may have contributed to some of the problems I encountered.
Don’t get me wrong — I don’t mean to knock Stanza for these problems. Given the sorry state of the SDK and Apple’s ludicrous restrictions on beta testing, I sympathize with any developer who tried to roll out an early app. I’ve just decided to wait for Stanza to mature a bit before trying it again.
> as long as your XHTML is sound, then you
> shouldn’t have to baby Stanza along.
For me, that’s the most peculiar aspect of Stanza. I take great care in preparing my content to make it look the way *I* want it to look, then the Stanza preprocessor does “intelligent” things to make it look otherwise. I suspect the developer is striving to achieve a consistent look and feel for all content, but I question whether or not this is a Good Thing.
August 8th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
I’m using Stanza with a Mac and a Kindle.
There are a few issues I notice with the program.
1) stanza somehow set itself to be the default program to open Excell Files. To add insult to injury it can’t actually open the file, just displays an error message. I hope the final version won’t have this quirk
2) I like the way that Stanza can open a file or a web page and turn it into a book. But I would really love it even better if, a) the pictures on the web page made it into the book, and b) if I could edit the book to remove extra weird stuff, like all the non-working links that get transported in from the sidebars of web pages.
3) It’s great that Stanza can translate these other formats to and from a Word file. But it would be even better if the Word file didn’t end up with so many page and column breaks.
4) also it would be nice if Stanza preserved bolded and italicized text
5) and as long as I’m dreaming I’d really like to be able to put in a table of contents with links to the appropriate chapters,
6) and I’d like to be able to input and or change the title and author for the Mobipocket file. So if I want to read “Vixens of the Summer Moon”, and I don’t want my co-workers drooling over my shoulder on my breaks, I can retitle it “Flowers of the Summer Moon” or something.
I realize that all these comments make it sound as if I don’t like Stanza–that’s entirely the wrong impression. It’s great that there’s a program that lets a Mac read, and convert to, Mobipocket, finally. I just think these other tidbits might make it even better.
August 16th, 2008 at 8:24 am
needs dictionary support like ereader has but use free dictionary