Yay!
I just saw this update come along today on the iPhone, and I was worrying that with the Amazon purchase of Lexcycle, Stanza would be left to die quietly. Unfortunately, my wife took the iPad today to show off at her office, so I can’t check it out right away.
A few of the very useful tidbits that make it (to me) more useful than iBooks or the Kindle is the fact that this version will also let you send it ePub files, so ePubs on your DropBox account or received by mail are importable directly without having to resort to iTunes.
Stanza remains the reference for dealing with non-DRM’d and Fictionwise ePub files, with useful features like linking directly to a Calibre Library, plus I find that the Stanza’ metadata management tools are much more useful than those offered by iBooks or Kindle.
Other new features that I’ve found on the iPhone version is the ability to send an ePub file via mail, plus some other sharing options for Twitter and Facebook that just pass on where you’re at in the book. The groups section now handles personally defined collections, and auto-generated groups based on meta-data type tags. One things that’s missing still is automatic handling of series as a group and ordering them correctly.
Given that we now have a common version for both the iPad and the iPhone, something like the WhisperSync auto tracking of reading progress would be really nice since I do tend to switch back and forth between devices depending on where I am. I think that this could be implemented fairly easily by linking to an external service like DropBox to store and propagate a status file.