ePub Books Blog

TOC tutorial on how to read O’Reilly ePub books on your iPhone

Andrew Savikas over on the O’Reilly TOC has written a nice tutorial on how to read your O’Reilly ePub formatted books on the iPhone using Stanza.

One thing to note about this is that he was only successful in doing so when using his MacBook Pro, he was unable to say the same about the process using Windows.

After reading his article, I have to say the whole thing seems really easy!

Andrew did bring up one of Stanza’s failings, “A lot of the formatting isn’t (yet) supported by Stanza, including lists and tables. The text appears, but without bullets or clear indentation.” Perhaps it’s understandable about tables but I am surprised that lists are not yet supported. However, the app is still in beta and we know that Lexcycle are working hard on improving it.

One thing Andrew noted in his post was that O’Reilly are also looking into releasing their titles as individual iPhone Apps. I’m not convinced by this approach myself, but hey, for you iPhone users it will if nothing else give the proper formatting that O’Reilly intended

Okay, there’s a long way to go before ePub is a format that all devices can read properly, however it’s great to see that the industry is still moving forward.

Tags: ePub Readers, iPhone, O'Reilly, Stanza, Tutorials

Do you want to read ePub books on your iPhone?

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…

Tags: ePub Readers, Feedbooks, iPhone, Stanza