Living in France has given me a certain jealousy for the people in the US that can buy a Kindle as it seems to be one of the best implementations of an eBook reader, especially with it’s lifetime EVDO data connection for acquiring new content over the air any time, any where.
But I’ve been happily using my iPhone as my electronic newspaper with the NY Times application and my various RSS newsreaders (notably NetNewsWire) and decided to take a peek at the eBook marketplace on the iPhone.
After making a tour of a bunch, two free readers clearly stand out from the crowd: eReader and Stanza. Between these two, I haven’t seen the need to go looking at the non-free readers.
This is a decent eBook reader that has the interesting advantage to be tied to the eReader.com web site where you can build a bookshelf of free out of copyright content as well purchasing books from a large collection of books covering a variety of ages and subjects.
eReader has a few useful parameters that you can set for optimizing the reading experience to your eyesight and personal habits like changing the text size. Navigating books is obvious and straightforward, depending on the now ubiquitous swipe movement to move forward and backwards. However, this approach can be a little tedious if you read quickly, especially since the UI doesn’t use the entire screen for text.
Getting books into eReader depends on the books you find on the eReader site, where you add books to your virtual bookshelf and then download from the eReader client. It’s a pretty good setup, especially for acquiring copyrighted works. The free library is a little hit and miss, and it seems that some free books are available for limited time periods, as I saw some free books appear in the list one day, but when I went back to get them, they were no longer findable on the site.
Overall a nicely done reader that could use a little more polish and optimization, but combined with the eReader store, it makes for a useful package. It would be nice if they offered an iPhone optimized web site as a complement to the application, to save some time when searching for content.
Another quibble: All of your books end up on the same bookshelf list view so if you have a lot of books, that can get a little unwieldy, and you have no option to determine the sort order, currently alphabetical by title (I prefer alphabetical by author, but that’s me).
Now for me, this one is just about perfect as far as the reader component goes. When reading, the entire screen is dedicated to the text content, and you navigate the pages by tapping on the left or right side of the screen which is much more efficient than the swipe gesture. Pulling up the UI for additional navigation options is done by tapping near the center of the screen.
It links directly to an online library of copyright-free works that is simple to navigate, offering a hierarchy of Titles, Authors and Collections which you define manually. All of the books have been cleaned up and optimized for Stanza which is nice. So far I haven’t run into any issues with badly digitized works with OCR errors and stuff like that.
A search feature would be nice, but the hierarchy works well enough.
The main page lets you browse your collection by Title and Author and keeps a convenient list of recently opened and downloaded books. Nice, simple and effective.
The real bonus of this package is when you tie it to the Stanza desktop reader application. You can open just about any unprotected eBook format (HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, Rich Text Format, Kindle, Mobipocket, Microsoft LIT, Palm doc and Open eBook) and even raw text files. Once you have a file open on the desktop reader and you’re on the same Wifi network, you can download books directly to the iPhone across the local network. It autodiscovers the shared books via Bonjour so there’s nothing to setup.
Text, etc.
The one thing both readers should look into is the typography. The NYTimes application does this perfectly and should be used as a source of inspiration for anyone displaying large amounts of text on the iPhone.
Other contenders
There are a few other readers available on the iTunes App Store, but from doing a quick tour of the feature list none of them seem to offer anything significantly superior to Stanza especially when you factor in the price.
-
Bookshelf - comes with mixed reviews and costs $10
-
Bookz Text Reader - mixed reviews and costs $5
**Enjoyment!**I’m happily working my way through the collected works of Emile Zola in the original french, revisiting the Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom novels, Tom Swift, Robert E. Howard, Cory Doctorow, Jules Verne, Mark Twain and even semi modern science fiction from authors like Marion Zimmer Bradley.
My all-time favorite author’s copyright has been extended by the family and his estate, so there’s nothing by Robert A Heinlein available for free at the moment (sigh).
UpdateLexcycle just released an update to Stanza that adds some extra useful features. Notably:- When downloading, you can continue browsing for new books to download immediately.
- You can modify the metadata on the books to correct errors in the title or author - this is especially useful for prepending numbers to identify books is a series.
Both are relatively little things, but they make the experience that much more enjoyable. It was already my favorite, but it’s just become even more attractive.
NoteThe Stanza desktop client is currently in free beta with a projected price of $15 when it is officially released.