Developer: Apple

Release Date: July 2008

Introduction

The Apple iPhone and iPod Touch have become major platforms on which to read eBooks after the release of several dedicated eBook reader apps and although they have quite small screens they are big enough to read from. Along with the all-in-one, multi-function abilities, they can be a real choice for many people.

For this article I will be talking about the iPod Touch, but when it comes to reading books, both the iPhone and iPod Touch will do the same things.

Stanza eBook Reader

The Stanza eBook Reader was the first reader for the iPod Touch which was able to read ePub formatted eBooks and is a free application (although as it is now owned by Amazon, this may change in the future).

Stanza is a very well designed application with some really great features and plenty of settings, which allow the user to get the most from their reading experience.

• Change colours for the text, background and hyper-links.
• Change Font Size and Font Face.
• Adjust text Justification, Hyphenation, Line Spacing and Margins.
• Enable/Disable a books internal style attributes (font sizes, colours, indent, etc) and images.
• Auto load last book.
• Lock the book orientation.
• …and more.

Navigating your eBook collection can be done by title, author, subject (genre), last read and most recently downloaded. Stanza has also implemented the iTunes carousel navigation; when you turn the Touch to the landscape position, while browsing by title, you get that fancy 'book cover' carousel - very pretty for sure!

For me, one of the best features of Stanza is how you get your eBooks in to the reader. They have obviously put a lot of effort into making this process as easy and intuitive as possible and provide access to the most well known public domain repositories, including; Feedbooks and Project Gutenberg.

Getting eBooks into Stanza from epubBooks.com

As I do not have full integration into Stanza you will need to manually add the epubBooks.com website as a Book Source. Here are some step by step instructions:

• Open Stanza
• Click the Get Books icon at the bottom of the screen.
• Select the Shared tab at the top of the screen.
• Click the Plus (+) button (top-right).
• Enter a name (epubBooks) and this URL: www.epubbooks.com
• Select the Web Page button.
• Click Save.

epubBooks will then show in the Get Books listing and from here you can browser this website like you would any normal website. When you click on a download button the file will be downloaded directly into Stanza. Allowing you to access the book like you would any book in your library.

Conclusion

Some people may think that the Apple iPod Touch screen is perhaps a little on the small side for reading a book, but zooming in on the text is easy enough and if you've ever read on a PDA then you'll be used to hitting the page turn button a little more often.

Navigation is very intuitive, for both the native Apple apps and the Stanza eBook reader, who've made downloading eBooks very easy by providing direct access to several different sources such as Project Gutenberg. There should be no shortage of free eBooks to read.

Battery life is actually better than I expected, even when leaving the Wi-Fi turned on. However, the life span of the battery is one area where a dedicated eBook reader such as the Sony Reader is far superior as one charge can last many days, perhaps even a couple of weeks. Expect to keep your iPod Touch and iPhone battery topped up.

As a modern all-in-one device there is probably nothing out there at the moment that can match it in usability and richness of software, and although the iPod Touch doesn't not have cellular phone abilities or a persistent internet connection like the iPhone, it is still a very impressive all round device.

The iPod Touch and iPhone are very adept at reading books but having the ability to also use it as a RSS Reader, for Twittering or just checking the Weather, do make this a very desirable device for sure.

Final Thoughts

If you're a hardcore reader then I'd say this is not what you want as your primary eBook reading device, rather more as a supplementary reader.

For those of you who are casual readers - perhaps just reading for 20 minutes a day while on the train to work - then the iPhone or iPod Touch will be very practical indeed.