Must-Have iPhone App: Stanza
It’s awfully tough to avoid the hype surrounding the new iPhone release, but so far I’ve managed to completely ignore it on this site. You’re welcome.
The silence is over, though, because I’m just totally raving about Stanza - an eBook reader for the iPhone that’s now available in the App Store. This app is taking my life by storm, and it doesn’t even carry a blaster.
For those of us that had jailbroken iPhones (pre-2.0), there was one eBook reader available. It was acceptable, made decent use of the iPhone’s scrolling abilities, and was generally pleasant to use…that is, once you got books on it. Uploading books required that you access the phone via sFTP, upload the files to a specific directory, reload, and hope. Stanza makes the old reader run for the hills.
Number one best feature: it has a built-in book catalog! You’ve probably heard about Project Gutenberg - the place to get thousands and thousands of classic (read: out of copyright) books in digital format. Yep. That’s right. With just a few taps on the phone, you can access a decent selection of free books that will download to your phone for your reading pleasure. No syncing. No FTP’ing. Just reading.
The organization of the library is also excellent, allowing you to filter through books by author, title, recently read, etc.
The Stanza guys took an interesting turn on the page-flipping idea, choosing to go with the horizontal scroll rather than the vertical scroll. Personally, it doesn’t much matter to me…but I find it to be a little less “suave” than the vertical page jump that we saw in the original eBook app.
Overall, readability is top notch, the fonts are clear, and the application loads quickly. If I have a beef, it’s that the app doesn’t remember what book you were last reading; rather, you have to select the title, and the program picks up where you left off. Using the “recently read” sort gets you back to the same spot in two taps…not too, too bad.
In summary - if you’re an iPhone user, you need this app. Now.
Oh wait…did I mention that it’s free?