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Stanza 1.6 is out—with an embedded browser and ‘curl’ page transitions
November 27, 2008 | 7:29 am
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By David Rothman
Got the Web address of an e-book file you want to read on your iPhone or iPod Touch?
Simply type it in, and the just-released Stanza 1.6 will download it directly via its new embedded browser. From the Library screen, choose Online Catalog , then Direct Downloads, and hit the plus sign. You’ll see a screen asking for the Web address.
Another way exists to import books directly into Stanza via browsing. It’s the “Add Web Page” option, through which you can add the listings on a Web page to the Online Catalog screen. From the Catalog page, tap the + button and type in something like manybks.net for the Manybooks.net catalog. You’ll next follow the appropriate links to pick a title, then a format. See the screenshot showing the links for Magic for Beginners, a short story collection from the serendipitously named Kelly Link. Not all formats seen will necessarily work.
Glitch—but fix on the way
In a quick test, I could not succeed with the eReader format on Manybooks even though it’s theoretically supported. “It seems we aren’t able to handle books that don’t have chapter divisions (which it appears the ManyBooks files lack),” says Marc Pru’hommeau at Lexcycle. “We’ll try to get that fixed for the next release.”
For now, let’s regard these features as experimental and provide constructive feedback to Lexycle and other companies that are working step by step toward Kindle-like simplicity for the iPhone and other devices.
Meanwhile Stanza has added a “Curl” page transitions, obtainable through the Settings screen within Stanza. You can also adjust the speed of the page turn, so if you don’t notice the curl, just slow Stanza down.
Technorati Tags: Kelly Link,Magic for Beginners
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Comments:
Magic for Beginners is available directly through Feedbooks’ online catalog: http://www.feedbooks.com/book/3187
All of our files have chapter divisions and table of contents.
I would’ve focused on something different though for this news about Stanza 1.6 David: at Feedbooks we’ve been pushing for a better way to find similar books in Stanza for a while.
Whenever you select a book, it is now possible to get similar books and other books by the same author (the links are right after the description).
The main problem with public domain books isn’t the lack of titles available: it’s the lack of a right way to browse through them.
The “similar” feature is another good one, Hadrien, and I thank you for alerting us since I wasn’t aware of this earlier. I notice it’s available now as a standard piece of info from within Stanza. Of course I’d be curious about the methods used to pick the similar titles. Can you enlighten us? Does this happen at the bookstore level, as I suspect? And do methods vary? Totally agree with your interest in useful browsing. Meanwhile happy honorary Thanksgiving! David
Hi David,
Thanks for pointing out Stanza’s new feature — it works with the barebones ePUB format available from the iPhone side of manybooks.net (I’ve got to do something about the multiple sites!): http://manybooks.net/m/
I agree with Hadrien — browsing the great number of public domain titles is the biggest difficulty, and I like the “similar titles” idea they’ve implemented on Feedbooks. On manybooks.net I’ve focused on linking to additional work by
whoops
… I’ve focused on linking to additional work via the author’s name, the genre, and via books in series — but if I could figure out a way to programmatically determine similarities that would be even better.
Yeah Matthew I agree: author’s name, genre and series are also a pretty good ways to avoid the linear browsing on PG.
We’ve added a link to find the rest of the books available for the author too in the catalog, and I’ll probably add the possibility to see where a book is listed (we have a system of lists, rather than book series on Feedbooks).
Everything happen at book store level David, in our case we use downloads to identify similar books. If many users download the same books, we identify them as similar over time.
Aside from the catalog itself, we also provide this information in our books: click on a link inside a book and it’ll download the book (works on any connected device: iPhone, Kindle, Smartphone etc…).
We’d like to keep moving in that direction, but for the moment Stanza’s authentication features are still too limited: we use it strictly for feeds/newspapers subscriptions. Our API is already capable of logging downloads and providing customized recommendations: I hope that we’ll be able to enable this as soon as possible in Stanza.