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Stanza 1.4 video—complete with display of DRMless Pan Mac ePub books
September 12, 2008 | 11:32 am
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By David Rothman
Stanza 1.4, the next version of this promising e-reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch, will be out as soon as the App Store signs off on it.
Meanwhile the screenshot from a demo movie (Quicktime, iPhone/Touch) shows the goodies on the way. Notice? You can now see book covers in glorious color. That has merchandising possibilities. Regardless of the glories of E Ink machines like the Kindle, you can’t shop in color while you’re away from your desktop.
Toward Kindle-simple purchases of nonDRMed ePub books
Like the Kindle, the iPhone can download from most locations in the States, plus countries not covered by the K machine. And the Touch does WiFi. Result? The Stanza can solve the problem of, "How do I get e-books into my machine?" Things are pretty easy now for direct downloaders of books from public domain sites like Feedbooks’ and Munsey’s, and they should become still simpler. Now just wait until Lexcycle, Stanza’s developer, does the inevitable and gets serious about capabilities for content-related e-commerce from those places or others.
Enticingly, the demo is showing two nonDRMed ePub titles from the Pan Macmillan store—Perdido Street Station and Stealing Light. Blend in Stanza’s existing capabilities with ways to pay for books on your iPhone or Touch, either through independent retailers, Pan Mac directly or Apple. Then you may see the start of a new eco system for e-books. Same for eReader in time (ideally with ePub capabilities). May Pan Mac jump in! If certain other publishers don’t want to skip anti-piracy precautions entirely, then they might consider social DRM, which still could play on a variety of machines and let you own books for real.
What 1.4 still won’t have: A global progress bar, which the eReader app does. But Lexcycle in the past has assured me it’s still on the agenda. There are flow-related challenges and others to overcome before this can happen.
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Comments:
When is Stanza Desktop going to get the ability to keep italics and other formatting in books it imports? Until it does that, Stanza is pretty useless to me, no matter how good it gets at reading ePub books. I don’t have any ePub books, and apparently there’s no easy way to convert plain HTML or Mobipocket books into ePub yet.
Chris, I’d welcome an answer from Marc at Lexcycle, but keep in mind the future–it’s ePub. In the long run, a standard format will be better for developers, not just readers. Meanwhile keep in mind the existence of Stanza’s desktop app for conversions. It ain’t perfect, but as I recall it can handle HTML and Mobi. Thaks. David
Straight mobipocket to ePub conversion is a very bad idea: you’ll only get mediocre results at best.
Plain HTML without properly dividing the flows won’t give you a very good result either.
You can always use Feedbooks to convert those files though. We’re still working on UI improvements but there’s already a WYSIWYG editor online.
Just to be clear, both Mobi and HTML are on the menu of Stanza. But, yes, for now, it seems to do best at ePub. If ePub becomes a true standard, we’ll see PUBLISHERS doing the conversion—into ePub. And then the world will be a simpler place. I applaud Hadrien’s efforts in that area. Optimized HTML capability would be nice as well for Stanza, but there should be other apps around for offline reading with that, if the browser won’t do the trick. Eventually browsers and e-readers may merge. Thanks. David
Chris:
I don’t know what kind of eBooks you have, but if some of them are public domain, you can get ePub versions of them from Feedbooks.com or munseys.com (as well as a very small selection on my site)
Chris, David is correct in saying that we do best with ePub. ePub files shared via Stanza Desktop with Stanza iPhone do retain their styling and formatting. However, you are right that we lose most styling when importing from other formats. We are truly working hard to resolve this limitation, but some of the transcoding issues are (somewhat surprisingly) non-trivial.
We hope that until we have better retention of formatting, you are able to enjoy using Stanza for those works you import from your machine for which styling and formatting is not an intrinsic part of the work.
Oddly, neither Feedbooks nor Munseys have the public domain books I am most inclined to want—the Maurice Leblanc “Arsène Lupin” novels. Which is odd for Munseys, given that Blackmask had about as many of them as were available.
But I have a lot of them on the BlackMask DVD I bought as zipped HTML files.
Apart from that, I would like to try reading some of my Baen Webscription or Tor freebie books in Stanza, but I can’t convert them and have them keep their formatting.
Oh you mean this: http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2890 ?
The rest of them will be online very soon (they’re all avilable in french already).
And keep in mind that Feedbooks is an open platform where anyone can publish a book, not some mass conversion facility. Anyone can help, and we avoid mass conversion for obvious quality reasons.
Chris, Hadrien mentioned the specific author you were looking for. To the broader question of the Munseys content, they have been working hard to convert many of their titles to ePub, but they haven’t yet completed the process. We hope in the coming weeks and months we will be able to directly syndicate more and more of their catalog.
As for the free Baen and Tor books, we have contacted them about the possibility syndicating their books directly via Stanza. We hope very much that we can work with them to provide their generous offerings directly to all our Stanza users.
I watched the demo movie (m4v). WOW!! That’s *exactly* what I wanted to see. Thanks much. That video answered many questions and I expect I’ll be doing some sort of post about it too. This is very, very exciting — especially if Apple does an iPod Touchbook!
@Marc: I asked on the Baen Bar about the possibility of Baen making Webscription books available in ePub, and Arnold Bailey replied, “I haven’t seen a particularly good implementation on anything except Mobi and Mobi already works on more things.” Such as Bookshelf, which syndicates Baen Free Library and Webscription books to its users already.
@Chris: Tell that Baen guy that ePub works on *more* devices, including the Sony Reader. Or has he missed the fact the Reader just *sold out* in the UK and that Sony isn’t conceding eBooks to Amazon?
Man, I don’t know which is worse now: publishers slapping DRM on files or being narrowminded in the file formats they offer!
@Mike, Chris
I wouldn’t call Arnold @Baen narrow minded in the formats he supports. For instance Baen already supports .lrf for the Sony Reader. Currently he is correct in his observation that converting the current Baen Library to ePub does not give his customers any real benefit in terms of the platforms that they can view their content on.
Now that will probably change over the next year, and hopefully he will reconsider when it does.
I stand corrected of my ignorance. I did not know he already had the Sony Reader format.
@Chris:
Our site has the Maurice Leblanc “Arsène Lupin” you want:
http://www.web-books.com/BookInfo.php?BookID=645
We have developed a platform to efficiently convert files into the EPUB format. Our platform can also convert Microsoft Word into EPUB. It is a free service for anyone.
Well, you have three of them anyway. Hopefully you’ll soon get all the others too. (As an amusing note, those copies of The Hollow Needle and Arsène Lupin both derive from physical books in my own possession, that I sent in to be scanned and proofed.)