Ready … Set … Read!
This is the headline on the Lexcycle website for their new iPhone eBook reader, Stanza. They are 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. They have a demo video of Stanza running on the iPhone (Quicktime).
Okay, so now you have your Stanza/iPhone ePub reader, but where do you get your books from? This is the easy part…
Feedbooks.com have spent a lot of time working to make their catalogue available in the ePub format and according to the Feedbooks Stanza/iPhone help page;
Browsing and downloading books once you’ve installed Stanza is very intuitive, just select Online Catalog and Feedbooks to get books from our service
They even have some nice step-by-step pictures to help you along.
No commercial books are yet available in the ePub format so all the titles you will find at Feedbooks are in the public domain, these should however keep anyone going for a lifetime.
Right, all I need now is an iPhone or iPod Touch…
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.
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.