Stanza

Stanza review

Stanza is a free ebook reader available for iPhone, iPod Touch, and downloadable for use on PCs and Macs. I've downloaded it onto an iPod Touch, and have been playing with it. So far, I have not located a book with an index in it for free, and since I'm being a cheapskate, I haven't bought a book yet.

The prices for downloadable books are a lot higher through the services available to Stanza. It's definitely not the 9.99 Amazon price. I have heard that Amazon is keeping prices artificially low to stimulate Kindle purchases, and this seems to be born out by the pricing I'm seeing for books elsewhere, like Fictionwise and O'Reilly. But there are tons of free books to be downloaded, more than enough to keep me busy. If I find a free one with an index, I'll post about it. I'm not paying $24.00 for a book just to see the index - ;-)

Page turning in Stanza is much nicer than on a Kindle. You have several choices, sliding, curl up, or none, and you can choose the amount of time for the page turn. The fonts are nice, resize easily, and you have many choices for them. Flipping the Touch sideways gives you a wide view of the book, but I like the vertical view.

One of my favorite touches is that you can choose a paper background for the book's image. You can have marble, old parchment, clouds, all subtle effects that don't interfere with reading. I like the parchment and the beach sand ones, they look like paper.

There is a dictionary available when you are on wi-fi, and looking up a word is as simple as pressing it with your fingertip. I'm not finding a note-taking feature, but there is bookmarking.

Fairly nice interface! I think I could read in a doctor's office for a little bit with this. I don't know if I would do more than an hour with it, unlike the Kindle's kindly screen.

Kindle vs. iPhone (and no, I don't have either... )

At some point, the warring formats and digital rights management are going to come to a Betamax vs. VHS battle. Kindle gets you books and gives them to you as long as you use their device and their format, and is still kluging PDF files. The iPhone was similarly closed to innovation until the 2.0 release and the iPhone app store, and is now able to take all kinds of book formats with Stanza, as well as allowing you install other fun things to waste your time that you should be spending indexing.

Unless the Kindle opens up, I don't see it winning this war. Reading books aloud to me is not the major feature I would have jumped for in this release. I would have jumped for good internet access, but I guess there's no money to be made there.

Karen Templer on the Readerville weblog thinks that there will be an iPhone app for Kindle books soon, but that it will come with a price - you will have to have a Kindle to use it. This will not be convergence, or a clear winner.

Reading various accounts around the web of the Amazon press conference this morning, I’ve seen some lamenting that there was no announcement of an iPhone app, with the suggestion that was expected. Certainly the remarks last week begged speculation, but the more I think about it, the less I think they’re on the brink of simply making Kindle-format books available for other devices. That’s what they’ll have to do if they want the whole Kindle concept to survive for the long term, but it seems to me that, for now at least, they’re deeply invested (literally and figuratively) in the device—in making Kindle-format books available to Kindle owners. So while I can see them releasing an iPhone app this year, I don’t see it as standalone access for the purchase and enjoyment of Kindle books. I see it as a way to enable people with Kindles to sync those books onto their phones when going places without the Kindle. (In fact, here’s how PW put it: “… Bezos said Amazon is working on ways to sync the Kindle to other mobile devices.”) In other words, an iPhone app will cost you $359, Kindle included.

And no one mentions the index, anywhere, ever. It's discouraging.