UPDATE: Stanza is no longer maintained so I’d recommend you try out Bluefire Reader. Checkout my iPhone or iPad pages for some more information on reading EPUB books on the iPhone with Blurefire and other apps.
Ready … Set … Read!
This is the headline on the Lexcycle website for their new iPhone eBook reader called Stanza. They’re touting this as the ‘premier electronic book reader for the iPhone and the iPod Touch‘ which more importantly (at least for me) has the ability to read ebooks in the EPUB format.
Stanza is still in beta at the moment so there will be a few bugs hanging around but hopefully lexcycle will go final soon. [UPDATE: Stanza is now considered one of the best free eReaders out there with most bugs fixed, and available for iPhone and iPad].
Okay, so now you have your Stanza/iPhone EPUB reader, but where do you get your books from? This is the easy part…
You can download lots of free EPUB ebooks right here on epubBooks.com.
Alternatively, you can use Feedbooks, whose catalogue is available from directly within the Stanza app.
Browsing and downloading books once you’ve installed Stanza is very intuitive, just select Online Catalog and Feedbooks to get books from our service — feedbooks.com
Commercial ebooks are not currently available so all the titles you’ll find are in the public domain, but what’s available from both epubBooks and Feedbooks should keep everyone reading happy for a lifetime.
Right, all I need now is an iPhone…
UPDATE: I now have a full review of the iPod Touch and the Apple iPad – these two reviews have lots of information on adding ebooks to your Apple device as well as what other EPUB eReader apps are available, and all of which can be used on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
I can’t argue with you that Stanza needs to be more compliant with the standard, I’m sure Lexcycle will be working toward this, but I still see this as a great step forward for ePub.
We should see Mobipocket later this year and perhaps even Adobe DE will get ported, but in the meantime we don’t have a reader (that I know of) on the iPhone for reading ePub formatted books.
Stanza may not be perfect but it does get ePub out there…this has to be a good thing.
While Stanza might be useful for fiction, the fact that it doesn’t even support the most trivial elements of real markup (headings, tables, etc) mean that it isn’t a usable generic ePub reader. I’m waiting for something that actually supports the standard.
Since I wrote this post Stanza has matured greatly and it became one of the best free reading apps out there and although it is now owned by Amazon, it does seem that it’s still being developed.
Unfortunately it appears that the latest update of Apples OS5 for iPhone and iPod Touch breaks Stanza.
It crashes in the latest update on an iPhone 4 as well
It also needs an import function to find the books I already have on my iPhone
David/Vincent, unfortunately Stanza is no longer maintained. I’ve put a notice at the top of this post with a link to my iPhone review page, which has up-to-date info on reading on your iPhone (/ereaders/apple-iphone-ipod-touch).