0

By David Rothman

imagePsst! Lexcycle updated it Stanza e-reader to version 1.8.1 this week, although it would have been nice if the company had put out an announcement. I didn’t see anything from @stanza_reader.

The new version, about which I found out through addicted2iphone’s Tweet, includes these wrinkles:

Chapter position is now correctly restored when starting in the landscape mode.
Added the ability to disable tap & hold functionality for word definition
Fixed font aliasing problem when reading in a landscape mode
Added the ability to disable screen dimming feature

So go to the App Store and update—or get Stanza, period. Among iPhone/Touch apps, Stanza remains my fave by far.

Ahead will be Stanza’s ability to render Adobe-DRMed PDF and ePub–expected in the next few months.

Wild speculation about Stanza/Lexcycle, Adobe, FW and Google—nothing more

Speaking of which, I’ll be most curious about the relations between Adobe and Lexcycle. Will Adobe someday buy out Stanza to position itself better for recent platforms such as the iPhone and Android?

Or how about Fictionwise/Barnes & Noble, owner of the eReader format, which Stanza can read even in a DRMed version?

Or maybe even Google? Stanza, after all, debuted with online-library integration from the start, and the dictionary is really online even though many users would never notice that. Could Stanza eventually be a path to cloudish e-reading? Maybe even with a lightweight variant of Gears involved in one way or another? If nothing else, a Google-Stanza arrangement could speed up the adoption of Android, a platform that Lexcycle should be supporting in the near future.

Those are simply my musings based on feature sets and/or existing alliances.

The library angle: The DRMed PDF capabilities mean that Stanza will soon be able to read library e-books.

Reminder: I’m not the biggest fan of DRM and hope that perhaps Lexcycle, as a business partner of Adobe, will nudge the former in the direction of social DRM.

 
0