Stanza's usability and other issues: 85,000 users already—and here's how this iPhone e-reader will evolve

Moderator’s note: Marc is clearly listening to your feedback. I myself am a big Stanza fan. Question: Should we run a separate post on, say, eReader or BookShelf—and then likewise invite the devs to reply to your comments on the pros and cons? – D.R.

We at Lexcycle have been overwhelmed by the support and encouragement from the e-book community (especially TeleRead) regarding Stanza.

The praise has given us the confidence to forge ahead, and the constructive criticism has tempered our hubris and made us wiser.

And overall, the community’s many years of musings over what would make a perfect e-book reader has provided us with invaluable insight into the needs and wants of those who see the future of books unchained from their bindings.

85,000 Stanza users in a dozen countries

Stanza has gotten off to a tremendous start, with 85,000 users spread out over a dozen countries. This is thanks in no small part to Hadrien Gardeur of Feedbooks.com, whose content is central to the success of Stanza.

His vision and tireless work in creating the Feedbooks API cannot be underestimated, and his many efforts over sleepless nights half a world away in working out nuances with the glue between Stanza and Feedbooks have been truly heroic. Nearly half a million books have been downloaded from Feedbooks via Stanza thus far!

The text styling issue

That being said, we are still at the start. One of the major complaints our users have is the loss of text styling when importing from other e-book formats. For example, if you open a .lit file in Stanza Desktop and then share it with Stanza iPhone, nearly all the text styling is lost in the process.

Note that this is not a limitation of Stanza iPhone itself (which fully supports advanced book formatting, as can be seen in its support for the formatting of the Feedbooks books), but rather it is a conversion issue when loading other formats into Stanza Desktop. Improving our support for book styling is one of our highest priorities at this point. As any frequent reader of the MobileRead forums knows, scaling the Tower of e-Babel is a laborious process, and while we are off to a good start, we are still on the first few steps.

On the issues of Windows, metadata and configurability

Some of the other criticisms that are mentioned in these threads are things that we have already addressed. For example, one of the major shortcomings of Stanza until recently was that Stanza Desktop was only available for Macintosh computers. We released Stanza Desktop for Windows last week, which has resulted in an enormous surge in Stanza’s usage.

Stanza iPhone (which was released a couple of weeks ago) now also provides the ability to edit a book’s title, author, and subjects. We expect similar metadata editing to come to Stanza Desktop in the near future. In the vein of features that we’ve added in response to user feedback is user-definable bookmarks, which will appear in Stanza iPhone 1.2 very soon.

Another persistent user complaint is that Stanza iPhone doesn’t provide enough configurability, but this is due to the non-obvious fact that Stanza’s preferences are actually located inside the central iPhone Settings application, and not inside Stanza itself.

While this is in accordance with Apple’s own iPhone user interface guidelines, the confusion that this has caused is significant. So for Stanza iPhone 1.3, we are moving some of the often-used preferences inside Stanza itself, which has the additional benefit of enabling us to provide a live preview of changes to fonts, colors, and other display preferences like line spacing and text alignment.

Already supports ePub table of contents

Other reported issues mention are things whose accuracy we question. For example, the review at http://jedisaber.com/ebooks/Readers.asp mentions that we do not support ePub table of contents, which is not accurate.

In both Stanza Desktop and Stanza iPhone we have full support for the table of contents defined in the ePub book. That same review also claims that Stanza does not return to their last position when re-opening a book, but Stanza has had that feature since it was first released, and we haven’t heard any other reports of it not working.

Sharing glitches are on the fix list

And finally, there are those straight-up bugs that we are working to fix. For example, some people have problems sharing between Stanza Desktop and Stanza iPhone. These are usually configuration issues with their firewall, network, or Bonjour support which we are often able to guide them through, but there are other problems that are legitimate bugs that we are in the process of researching and correcting.

The laundry list of issues could continue ad nauseam, but we think we have expressed our central point: we are listening to our users, we have corrected many problems already, and we are working hard on correcting others. The Stanza forums at http://www.lexcyle.com are a good place to discuss individual problems and share experiences with other users.

Other improvements on the plate

As for the future, that is where the excitement lies. We are working on our list of short-term improvements, such as the ability to edit a book’s metadata from within Stanza, implementing text styling for more e-book formats, a smoother set up experience for sharing books between the desktop and the mobile device, the ability to search in the entire book (rather than just the current chapter), and configurable device-side hyphenation. And for the longer term, our priorities are the same as that of the community. The big one, of course, is integrated library management, iTunes-style. This will enable a user to catalog their entire library, assign cover artwork, and share en masse with their mobile device without having to open each book individually.

Other projects include integration into commercial bookstores, adding search support to the Lexcycle Online Catalog, implementing ability to take notes and highlight text, enabling the user to send excerpts of books to friends via e-mail. The list goes on; we clearly have our work cut out for us.

Further feedback appreciated

We hope that the TeleRead community will continue to provide us with the valuable feedback they have given thus far. It is only with the insight of enthusiasts like you that we will be able to help bring about the revolution in electronic reading. And while no software application can be everything to everyone, that doesn’t mean that we aren’t going to try 🙂

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Marc Prud’hommeaux joined Lexcycle in early 2008, coming from BEA Systems.

He has been in the software industry in various capacities for over ten years, and holds a BA in Philosophy from Cornell University.

Screen image: It originally appeared in a gung-ho Wired review of Stanza.

Note: I invited Marc to respond. The actual title of the post was “Lexcycle responds to TeleRead on Stanza’s usability, issues, and future.” I couldn’t resist tweaking it, however to get in the number of users Stanza has attracted in just a month or so. Meanwhile here’s my latest suggestion. At some point maybe Marc can see if Stanza can work with nonDRMed Mobipocket files that originally were PDF books and were translated via Mobipocket Desktop. – D.R.