The Stanza e-reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch remains a big favorite of mine.
Now it’s better than ever—with the Version 2 release and easier recovery of “lost” books from the vagaries of OS upgrades.
I remain a Stanza cheerleader, because it lets me display books exactly the way I want to see them. Plus, it’s blended in well with a variety of public domain sites and bookstores.
In V. 2—no bomb in this case!—I especially appreciate the greater ease of changing font sizes via the two-finger “squeeze” method.
As shown in the left image, you’ll see a preview, and you can then use the “Save” to lock up the change from your squeeze. The text will rearrange itself with the correct margins on both sides. Awesome. Stanaz is worlds better than the Kindle app for the iPhone even though I can see the merits of the latter for novices.
What’s more, as documented by the image to the right, you can still use Stanza and your iPhone or iPod browser to download public domain books and read titles from various sources, even a Stanza section of Fictionwise.
Significantly, Fictionwise is now a subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, a fierce rival of Amazon, which owns Lexcycle, Stanza’s developers).
I just hope that Amazon will continue to let Lexcycle do its thing. If nothing else, may Stanza fans fare well in Ficitionwise’s transition from its old eReader format to an ePub-based one!
For now, yes, Stanza can read Fictionwise’s DRMed eReader books. So does this mean Stanza can or will in fact be reading DRMed ePub? If so, that would be some wonderful ecumenicalism from Amazon.
Easier recovery of books
Not all has been rosy with Stanza. In the past, Stanza has lacked an easy way to recover books that may vanish during an operating system upgrade—a woe I’ve suffered myself. This doesn’t happen often. But when it does, imagine the hassles.
Now Lexycle has released a Java tool to make it much simpler to recover “lost” books via iTunes. Within your iTunes backup folders, it looks for e-book files, which, alas, are hard to identify with unhelpful, numbers-cursed names.
Lexcycle admits the file-discovery programs has some rough edges, and I myself haven’t been able to get it going so far in Windows 7. But I love the fact that the company is following up on user complaints, and I suspect that Lexcycle will have the tool tamed completely in no time at all.
My problem: I get the following error message: “java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Cannot find backup folder; please specify it manually.” So far I haven’t been able to find it manually, perhaps because of some iTunes-related complications, and the fault may well be mine. I’d urge you to try the new tool yourself and share your impressions and tips.
Related: Ipoddnn story on Stanza upgrade and Paul Biba’s earlier TeleRead post on the topic.
