The Apple iPhone and iPod Touch have become major platforms on which to read ebooks after a number of dedicated ebook apps were reeased and although they have quite small screens they are big enough to read from. Add to this the all-in-one, multi-function nature of the devices, and 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 eReader
The Stanza ebook reader was the first app dedicated to reading EPUB ebooks on the iPhone and iPod Touch and what made it even better was that it is free. It's a very well designed eReader with some really great features and plenty of settings, allowing users to get the most from their reading experience. Here's a few highlights;
- Change colours for the text, background and hyper-links. a.sheppard@kingham-hill.oxon.sch.uk
- 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 much more.
Navigating your eBook collection can be done by title, author, subject (genre), last read and most recently downloaded. Stanza also implemented the iTunes carousel style of navigation; turn your iPod to the landscape position, while browsing by title, and 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 onto the reader. They've obviously put a lot of effort into making this process as easy and intuitive as possible, providing access to the best known public domain repository, around; Project Gutenberg.
Getting ebooks onto Stanza from epubBooks.com
As epubBooks doesn't have full integration with Stanza you'll have to manually add the website as a Book Source. Here's 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, letting you now browse the site like you would any normal website. When you click on any download link the file will be downloaded directly to Stanza.
Conclusion
Some people think the iPhone/iPod Touch screens are perhaps a little on the small side for book reading, 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 than you would with a larger eReader device.
Navigation is very intuitive and Stanza have 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 on the iPod Touch is better than I'd expected, even when leaving the Wi-Fi turned on. However, the life span of the battery is one area where a dedicated eReader such as the Sony Reader is far superior, as one charge can last many days, perhaps even a couple of weeks. Expect to regularly top-up your Apple's battery.
As a modern all-in-one device there's nothing out there at the moment that can match it in usability and richness of software, and although the iPod Touch doesn't have cellular phone abilities or a persistent internet connection like the iPhone, it's still a very impressive all round device.
The iPod Touch and iPhone are very capable ebok readers, but by also having the ability to use it for task such as Twittering and checking the Weather, it does make it a very desirable device for sure.
Final Thoughts
If you're a hardcore book reader then this is not what you'd 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.