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By David Rothman

image 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 an option for reading Kindle-format books, not just the ePub variety (even though I continue to hope that the e-book world will eventually standardize on nonDRMed ePub).

Meanwhile three cheers for Amazon, which bought Lexcycle, Stanza’s developers, for allowing Stanza development to continue. The new version, like the old, will also work on the iPod Touch and iPhone.

Other new features in the 3.0 update, include PDF, DjVu and  Comic Book Archive support, as well as Turkish and Bulgarian translations.

And for “devices running iPhone 3.2 and higher,” users will be able to “transfer books via iTune by dragging files into the ‘Stanza Documents’ part of the ‘File Sharing’ section at the bottom of the ‘Apps"’ tab that appears when you select your iPad from the ‘Devices’ list in i Tunes.” Also, users will be able to “open books  directly from web pages and e-mail attachments.”

I’m sure Paul and Chris will want to weigh in with their own opinions, and so will other TeleRead community members. But for me—at least based on my brief tryout and subject to change—here’s a big thumbs-up.

Update, 12:22 a.m., June 4: The Bonjour desktop program, which Stanza uses for file transfers from desktops, isn’t working on my HP. I don’t know if the fault is limited to my system or will affect others. I can download files directly to the iPad from public domain sites, etc., just fine.

Update, 1:29 a.m.: Comment spotted in App Store: “The PDF support seems to work very well. I dropped a couple of my D&D Dungeon PDFs into Stanza to give it a try, and they look terrific. ‘Like they were made to display on the iPad’, according to my girlfriend.” OK, so I’ll forget about the fancy tricks for now and use iTunes to pick up the PDFs.

 
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