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By David Rothman

image Zachary Bedell’s BookShelf software pulled ahead of Stanza  and BookZ today in my little iPhone e-reader face-off, at least for now.

Via WiFi my iPhone could fetch listings for my entire Mobipocket directory. Talk about solving the challenge of picking up the e-library on my desktop PC!

The interface philosophy is superb on the whole. You can make the book fill up your screen without distractions and probably use all the iPhone’s fonts, or at least as many as Stanza and BookZ can.

Ahead are more details, including an important caveat: All of the e-reading programs mentioned here are in beta in effect, whether or not you pay.

No, I haven’t forgotten eReader and intent to cover it in a separate review post.

I can say, however, that while eReader will fast be changing, BookShelf is nicer right now, with more customization. Groan, it’s too bad that DRM and eBabel get in the way of your using BookShelf to read books from large publishers.

The cons of Bookshelf

BookShelf’s other negatives? With my version of BookShelf, the all-important font preferences function apparently would work on my iPod Touch, the phone-less version of the iPhone.

DearAuthor’s Jane did not have the same problem, and I suspect Zachary can solve this hassle for me. I’ve also suffered lockups at times, as well as an inability to read some Mobi files. Among other formats are TXT, HTML, Fictionbook2, Palm Doc, and Plucker—all with images, except for the former.

Beta-ware even though you pay for it

imageBookShelf is beta-ware even though Zachary is charging $9.95 for it through the iPhone App Store, but I’ll cut him lots of slack. Think of the the money the same  as you would a contribution to public television—something for the general good. Zac did not charge for a predecessor program.

What’s more, Apple didn’t make the SDK available until this past spring and reportedly crimped developers’ freedom to test, because of nondisclosure requirements. Another generic problem, not limited to e-bookware, may also be the lack of proper debugging tools for developers to analyze an compare problems.

Feedbooks API and ePub: Possible wrinkle for Bookshelf?

How to improve the BookShelf beta? When Zac gets a chance, I hope he’ll build Feedbooks’ API in, so people can enjoy the hundreds of books available that way. Support of the ePub standard format would help as well.

Meanwhile, as you can see from the BookShelf screen shot from Jane, you can make your e-book collection public within the limits of copyright law. Jane, in fact, is offering fiction from consenting authors . Brave soul. For security reasons and also in the fear of the Comcast bandwidth gods, I won’t provide the same service. But, yes, I was just one checkbox away from that capability.

Compared with Stanza…

image Stanaza, also in beta, can pick up the Feedbooks  library and render "HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, and Rich Text Format reading, as well as all the major eBook standards: unprotected Amazon Kindle and Mobipocket, Microsoft LIT, Palm doc, and the International Digital Publishing Forum’s new epub Open eBook standard. In addition to supporting a plethora of formats, Stanza features an open API that allows developers to implement support for their own document formats. Stanza is more than just a reader: it is a reading platform!" Exactly!

I like Stanza’s interface, not just in philosophy but in real life, since the font preferences are already working on my iPod Touch.

But Stanza, beta-ware like BookShelf, has a major problem for me and others using Windows systems. You’re SOL if you want to pick up your existing books. A companion program for desktops is available only for the Mac. Where is Dr. Frankenstein when we need him? You know–graft Bookshelf’s fetch capabilities onto to Stanza for us PC users? Or maybe instead transfer the working font preferences from Stanza to BookShelf?

BookZ: More crash-prone than the others

image As for BookZ (site not working as I write this), I can use it with HTML files on the Gutenberg site and get beautiful output. Not as much luck with TXT: the lines seem to be ragged. Perhaps I’m overlooking a feature to address this. As for the interface, BookZ makes the unfortunate mistake of trying to imitate a paperbook with a page flip, rather than smoothly moving ahead to the next page.

I want to see if I could successfully switch off this feature and try other customization such as font size changing and margin adjustments. But at this moment BookZ keeps crashing whenever I try to open a file.

Steve Studio is charging $2 or so. Here again, pay to help a brave little developer who put up with the complexities of dealing with Apple. Don’t expect to get your money’s worth right now.

Bottom line

For me at the moment, BookShelf seems the best bet because I lack a Mac and want to read my already-downloaded books, and because the crashes aren’t as frequent as with BookZ.

What works for me would not necessarily work for the typical e-book user, however, and at this point BookShelf is probably too much of a challenge for the typical nontechie reader. The same for BookZ. Even Stanza may confuse the uninitiated despite the ease of picking up content from Feedbooks and elsewhere (I had difficulty with other public domain source but assume that was simply because of server problems).

In the end, it’s possible that eReader and the forthcoming Mobipocket will probably be the big e-reading programs to catch on in the next few months as iPhone readers. This won’t be because they’re better programs for Jane and me, but because they’ll most likely be easer for novices. Typical newbies just want to get their software going smoothly, as opposed to worrying about goodies like directory-fetching. Crashes and other glitches will drive them off.

Meanwhile please note the qualifier, "In the next few months."

If Lexcycle can do a Mobipocket-simple desktop app for Windows machines and otherwise keep things easy for novices, then its Stanza app just might become a household name. And BookShelf might have a chance, too. I’m simply passing on my impressions of the moment.

 
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