Baen has rebranded its Webscriptions program, changing the name of the site to BaenEbooks.com, redesigning its look, and renaming the monthly e-book package program to “Monthly Baen Bundles”. All account information and previously purchased bundles will remain the same under the new site, though users who have set up their Kindles to receive e-books by e-mail will have to authorize a new email address. Sadly, with this change Baen is no longer providing OPDS catalog support for downloading e-books directly to Stanza. This is disappointing given that some people (such as me) don’t have iOS devices recent enough to...

Since posting my review of Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series, I have been moved to go back and reread the entire thing, including the latest book that was released only recently. And a couple months ago I had purchased a $20 Groupon to Barnes & Noble, which was only good through April. So it seemed like a reasonable excuse to snag the e-books and do some reading—especially since the books were so reasonably priced. Which, in turn, was a good excuse to get around to reviewing the new Nook e-reader for the iPad, iPhone, and Windows Desktop and see...

Paul linked to a positive Project Gutenberg review of Ibis Reader a few months ago, but it first came to my direct attention when I tried out Jolicloud and discovered what it was: a web-based EPUB reader. It was an interesting idea, I thought, but I wasn’t sure what it was really good for. But a couple of days ago, my perspective changed. One of the great things about Baen Webscriptions and the Free Library is that they allow people who have access to Baen e-books to read them on-line as well as download them. Not too many other...

One of the best surprises I got this Christmas was the gift of a used iPod Touch by my sister-in-law. She belongs to an iPhone family, and they’ve gotten so many iPhones over the course of the last few years that the Touch, originally bought for the kids to play with, was relegated to sitting around unused for months since the kids get to play with the older-generation iPhones now. And as a result, I have an iPod Touch again for the first time since losing my original one in June. It’s just a 1st-generation model, and only 8...

By now Stanza is the most robust e-reading application for iOS. It’s packed with features other apps, like Kindle or iBooks are missing. However it has one big disadvantage: no cloud-based bookshelf. The application is associated to a device not an account. There is no way to sync books and bookmarks like in Kindle. It’s fine when you have one device. Things get complicated to those iPhone or iPod Touch users who are buying iPads. They realize that to read books they collected in Stanza, they need to download them again. There are a few ways to transfer books to Stanza. I’d...

Curious how Stanza looks on the new high-resolution iPhone 4? Here’s a video. Of course, the resolution of the video is nowhere near as high as that of the iPhone, but it still seems to look pretty nice. (And the iPhone 4 itself looks nice in person, too—my brother showed me his a couple of weeks ago, with the free Winnie the Pooh iBook on it. I plan to get one before long myself…) (Found via eBookNewser.)...

Stanza has been updated. According to iTunes the update includes Support for iPhone 4 retina display Multi-tasking support Launch Stanza when PDF books are downloaded from external apps (like Mail and Safari)...

ZDNet's Tech Broiler, by Jason Perlow, has a really good review of all the major ereaders for the iPad: iBooks, Kindle, Stanza, eReader, Kobo Reader, Ibis Reader and vBookz. For once it is clear that the reviewer actually knows whereof he speaks. Good job! Anybody who is new to this space should take a look at this. Here's something that I didn't know that I found in the iBooks portion of the review: Unfortunately, iBooks doesn’t scale very well as the size of your EPUB library increases. While iBooks is perfectly fine for a few dozen or perhaps...

Everybody is raving about the new Stanza iPad app, so it is refreshing to read a review that says it's OK, but could be better. The always-excellent Amazon Kindle Review has a long article on this which concludes: Think there are a few main reasons Stanza is no longer my reading app of choice - Stanza is the best reading app for the iPhone on the iPad. It’s a very different sized device and Stanza’s team haven’t really taken that into account. Stanza hasn’t figured out the 150 options out of their 300 options that should be removed. In fact,...

Stanza has been updated for the iPad---I just gave it a quick test spin after it showed up tonight in the App store. Hooray! Stanza was no small reason why I bought an iPad, and I was endlessly disappointed when a high-res version didn’t appear as soon as the machine came out. The new version so far seems more or less like the old. The interface remains logical, and you can still hook up with a bunch of free and commercial sites from within the app. I just wish that Amazon would offer Stanza as...

In a Gadget Lab article Sorrell covers this real problem for Stanza users. Once the books are on there [Stanza], though, they’re stuck. You can jailbreak your iPhone and go fishing around in the file system, looking for the books. Or you can download a Java app that will churn through the iPhone backups on your computer and sift out the books within. The full instructions are in the article and thanks to Charlie for a real boon to Stanza users. ...

Got the following email just a few minutes ago: Folks, Sorry for the group email. I have decided to terminate my employment with Amazon. Today will be my last day. It saddens me that by doing so, I will also end my formal relationship with Stanza, and that I won't be working with Marc and Abe. Both are truly gifted technologists, and I have been spoiled getting to work with them through 5 companies over the past decade. I have a tremendous amount of passion for Stanza and am truly sad to no longer be working on a project...