ZDNet's Tech Broiler, by Jason Perlow, has a really good review of all the major ereaders for the iPad: iBooks, Kindle, Stanza, eReader, Kobo Reader, Ibis Reader and vBookz. For once it is clear that the reviewer actually knows whereof he speaks. Good job! Anybody who is new to this space should take a look at this. Here's something that I didn't know that I found in the iBooks portion of the review: Unfortunately, iBooks doesn’t scale very well as the size of your EPUB library increases. While iBooks is perfectly fine for a few dozen or perhaps...

Everybody is raving about the new Stanza iPad app, so it is refreshing to read a review that says it's OK, but could be better. The always-excellent Amazon Kindle Review has a long article on this which concludes: Think there are a few main reasons Stanza is no longer my reading app of choice - Stanza is the best reading app for the iPhone on the iPad. It’s a very different sized device and Stanza’s team haven’t really taken that into account. Stanza hasn’t figured out the 150 options out of their 300 options that should be removed. In fact,...

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...

In a Gadget Lab article Sorrell covers this real problem for Stanza users. Once the books are on there [Stanza], though, they’re stuck. You can jailbreak your iPhone and go fishing around in the file system, looking for the books. Or you can download a Java app that will churn through the iPhone backups on your computer and sift out the books within. The full instructions are in the article and thanks to Charlie for a real boon to Stanza users. ...

Neelan Choksi’s exit from Amazon is bad news for the millions of Stanza fans, given his importance in the evolution of this stellar program for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The Stanza issues raised here go far beyond the AWOL iPad-related additions and full use of the forthcoming iPhone OS. I remain baffled why Amazon must have just one reading app---a novice-targeted one---for use on nonKindles. Swallowed by Amazon just last year for more than a few dollars, Stanza would be a logical gap-filler and if nothing else deserves to be displayed sharply at...

Got the following email just a few minutes ago: Folks, Sorry for the group email. I have decided to terminate my employment with Amazon. Today will be my last day. It saddens me that by doing so, I will also end my formal relationship with Stanza, and that I won't be working with Marc and Abe. Both are truly gifted technologists, and I have been spoiled getting to work with them through 5 companies over the past decade. I have a tremendous amount of passion for Stanza and am truly sad to no longer be working on a project...

The way that pixel doubling makes some iPhone apps look on the iPad is one of the iPad’s only drawbacks, especially where e-book apps are concerned. However, those who have jailbroken their iPads may have another option. MacStories reports on a way to modify some apps to make them run at full iPad size without pixel doubling. It requires connecting to your device with ssh (which is only possible after jailbreaking and installing the OpenSSH Cydia package) and then adding several lines of code to an app’s info.plist file. The article writer tries this with several apps,...

David Morgenstern has an editorial on ZDNet in which he predicts a grim future for e-book device manufacturers that aren’t Apple. He notes that over the last few days, not one but two high-profile tablets have been cancelled—Microsoft’s two-screened Courier and HP’s Windows 7 slate—and he lays their cancellation squarely at the feet of the iPad. He also suggests that the three million unit guesstimate being tossed around for the Kindle device’s sales may be grossly overinflated, and it might well have sold below one million. (Though, given Amazon’s reticence to release numbers, either guess is probably equally valid.) Meanwhile,...

It’s been just over a year since Amazon bought Lexcycle, makers of Stanza, and as I reviewed Stanza the other day I glanced back over some of the old blog entries TeleRead writers made back then. I thought it would be interesting to look at a couple of those predictions or opinions in light of how the past year has gone. David Rothman wanted Washington to see the acquisition as a signal to investigate the e-book industry for possible monopoly practices: Washington often bungles things, but at least we can vote the bastards out...

I’ve already looked at the other two of the original “big three” iPhone e-book apps. The third of these apps is Stanza, the EPUB reader from Lexcycle. Stanza has a lot in common with eReader. They’re both great apps for the iPhone, their reading models are similar, and Stanza even shares the ability to download and read eReader-format e-books—even those protected by DRM. And like eReader, Stanza’s future in the iPad era is uncertain. Lexcycle COO Neelan Choksi said in a comment posted on Lexcycle’s forum on March 15th, “Currently, there is no work being done to customize...

I began writing this as part of the review of eReader that I posted earlier, brought on by thinking about eReader and Stanza’s failure to get high-resolution iPad versions, but I thought that it deserved its own separate post. Make no mistake, there has been a certain amount of anti-corporate paranoia going around about smaller, much-beloved e-book companies bought up by larger corporations ever since MobiPocket planned to release an iPhone version of its reader but was allegedly stifled by its new owner Amazon. Just look at what happened when Stanza vanished from the app...

This review represents an update to the review I posted looking at version 1.3 of the reader back in December, 2008. For the most part, I am copying the text of the eReader portion of that review and changing the parts of it that are no longer true. In this, as in future reviews in this series, I will focus the interview on the iPhone reading experience, then cover how the iPad experience differs afterward. eReader (now in v2.1.1) is the grande dame of iPhone e-reading applications, tracing its lineage back more than ten years to the...