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...

The way that pixel doubling makes some iPhone apps look on the iPad is one of the iPad’s only drawbacks, especially where e-book apps are concerned. However, those who have jailbroken their iPads may have another option. MacStories reports on a way to modify some apps to make them run at full iPad size without pixel doubling. It requires connecting to your device with ssh (which is only possible after jailbreaking and installing the OpenSSH Cydia package) and then adding several lines of code to an app’s info.plist file. The article writer tries this with several apps,...

David Morgenstern has an editorial on ZDNet in which he predicts a grim future for e-book device manufacturers that aren’t Apple. He notes that over the last few days, not one but two high-profile tablets have been cancelled—Microsoft’s two-screened Courier and HP’s Windows 7 slate—and he lays their cancellation squarely at the feet of the iPad. He also suggests that the three million unit guesstimate being tossed around for the Kindle device’s sales may be grossly overinflated, and it might well have sold below one million. (Though, given Amazon’s reticence to release numbers, either guess is probably equally valid.) Meanwhile,...

It’s been just over a year since Amazon bought Lexcycle, makers of Stanza, and as I reviewed Stanza the other day I glanced back over some of the old blog entries TeleRead writers made back then. I thought it would be interesting to look at a couple of those predictions or opinions in light of how the past year has gone. David Rothman wanted Washington to see the acquisition as a signal to investigate the e-book industry for possible monopoly practices: Washington often bungles things, but at least we can vote the bastards out...

I’ve already looked at the other two of the original “big three” iPhone e-book apps. The third of these apps is Stanza, the EPUB reader from Lexcycle. Stanza has a lot in common with eReader. They’re both great apps for the iPhone, their reading models are similar, and Stanza even shares the ability to download and read eReader-format e-books—even those protected by DRM. And like eReader, Stanza’s future in the iPad era is uncertain. Lexcycle COO Neelan Choksi said in a comment posted on Lexcycle’s forum on March 15th, “Currently, there is no work being done to customize...

And now it’s time to review an e-book app that does not have “Reader” in the name. Time to look at the big kahuna of iPad e-book readers, the one that was supposed to change the publishing industry forever: iBooks. There’s quite a lot to like in this free iPad e-reader, and only a few minor niggles. Given that it uses EPUB and is quite easy to load with content, I can use it as a replacement for Stanza on the big machine. In fact, I would say it’s as good as or even better than Stanza in...

I began writing this as part of the review of eReader that I posted earlier, brought on by thinking about eReader and Stanza’s failure to get high-resolution iPad versions, but I thought that it deserved its own separate post. Make no mistake, there has been a certain amount of anti-corporate paranoia going around about smaller, much-beloved e-book companies bought up by larger corporations ever since MobiPocket planned to release an iPhone version of its reader but was allegedly stifled by its new owner Amazon. Just look at what happened when Stanza vanished from the app...

This review represents an update to the review I posted looking at version 1.3 of the reader back in December, 2008. For the most part, I am copying the text of the eReader portion of that review and changing the parts of it that are no longer true. In this, as in future reviews in this series, I will focus the interview on the iPhone reading experience, then cover how the iPad experience differs afterward. eReader (now in v2.1.1) is the grande dame of iPhone e-reading applications, tracing its lineage back more than ten years to the...

Here’s another video: a ten minute exploration of some of the apps. I realize that you’re not going to be able to see the screen very well—the video itself is only about 1/4 the resolution of the iPad screen—but it will at least give some sense of scale, and how quickly everything loads. I’ll have some better screenshots and a more in-depth blog post soon....

In comments on a post relating to the announcement that iBooks on the iPad would be able to sync “free” EPUB books through iTunes, a reader expressed skepticism that users would be able to download them without iTunes. Hey iPhone/iPod Touch users: What can you download directly and use without using itunes on a separate computer? Can you download a file to the iPhone/iPod Touch via the web then open that file? If I want to read a Baen epub why do I need to go through iTunes? In fact,...

Received this email from Dave. I saw a note on the Lexcycle forum that Stanza was no longer listed in iTunes US Store. I just checked and it is no longer available in the Canadian store. I also noticed in the forum a rare posting from one of Stanza's creators stating that there is currently no plans to update the application for iPad. One has to wonder what Amazon is doing... It is definitely worrying. Wow! I just checked the US App Store and the Kindle App is still there, but Stanza is gone. ...

Shipment of some iPad accessories, such as the keyboard dock station, have been pushed back a month, from April to May. Over the last few days, the changes have appeared in the ship date on the Apple on-line store. It is speculated that they have simply sold out of their first batches and subsequent units will have to wait for the next order. Speaking of iPad accessories, Charlie Sorrel at Wired’s “Gadget Lab” blog has a list of five “essential” accessories to go with your new iPad. What’s first on the list? A ziploc bag. ...