Stanza: Amazon’s Kindle for Free
I've always wanted to own a Kindle, but the price tag is just too high. For some reason paying $400 for a digital reader is not the same thing as paying $400 for an iPod, even though I own just as many books as I do digital songs.
Well, it seems as if a new iPhone/iPop touch application just may fit the bill for those of us who can't afford a Kindle or who simply want a more portable device than what Amazon has to offer. If you haven't heard about it yet, this iPhone/iPod touch application is called Stanza. It reportedly has "out sold" Kindle, though the latter has been on sale for more than year. Well, yeah, Stanza is free and Kindle is not. But there are other reasons why Stanza may be appealing to consumers. It's more portable than Kindle, and because it's an iPhone/iPod touch application it means that you can for example listen to music while reading a book. It means that you have one less device to carry with you. 
My first reaction to reading about Stanza was that the iPod touch or the iPhone is too small to actually read a book on them. Reading a few website articles on the devices is one thing, but an entire book seems like a big strain on the eyes. But after downloading Stanza and then importing George Orwell's Animal Farm, I'm finding the reading experience not as bad as I thought it would. The text and lighting on my iPod is great for reading, especially when there's no other distractions like images and ads on the page. In reading an ebook, there's straight text in which you can read each page in under thirty seconds.
Scrolling a book in Stanza is very easy as well. Simply touch the right or left side of the screen, and you're taken to the next page. If you touch the middle of the screen, you're provided with slider which you can use to scan back and forth between pages. This area provides list of chapters for a selected book, as well a feature that allows you to bookmark individual pages. You can title your bookmarks for easy referencing later. Like Kindle, Stanza remembers the last page you were on when you quit out the application. Downloaded books, of course, can be read without being connected to the internet. 
Unlike Kindle, Stanza doesn't come with a text highlighting feature, nor is there an installed dictionary or ability to highlight a word and do an internet search. But it seems that these features can put into future updates of Stanza.
Getting Books on Stanza
The application includes a link to a catalogue of mainly public domain books on www.feedbooks.com. That catalogue includes mainly European and American literary classics such as Great Gatsby, The Brothers Karamazov, and Dicken's A Christmas Carol. These are great reads, especially since they are free, but unfortunately, Stanza does not currently support books encumbered with Digital Rights Management. So you can't add ebooks purchased from say Amazon.com. Ebooks on your local computer, however, can be download to the Stanza reader.
Since the application is free and is getting in the hands of so many users, access to commercial books might be made available in the near future. Perhaps those books could be bought through the iTunes Music store, especially if Apple doesn't plan on developing its own portable PDF reader, though it should. And maybe Amazon itself might make its Kindle books available for Stanza downloads, because either way, Amazon would still selling their ebook stock.
I'm not sure I'd would want to read all types of books solely on Stanza or a Kindle-like device, but the portability of such a reader can't be ignored for avid book lovers.
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Comments
The success of Apple is tied directly to product innovation. Everything they have done since the Apple II, except for the dark time when Steve Jobs was gone, has always produced products that people want to own because they are innovative, cool and very user friendly. If Apple thinks that enough people would want to read best selling books, on their iPhone or iPod Touch then they will sell the books though the iTunes Store and reap the profits.
My personal opinion is that the experience of reading a book is very different from reading material on a computer screen or a PDA/phone. When I travel, I always take paperback books to read because they save weight and take up less space then their hardback versions.
Apple has probably given this market a lot of thought and decided it’s not worth the effort. The fact that you don’t see many people using Kindles or the Sony reader have shown Apple and others that printed books on paper are here to stay for awhile.
eReader is another and it is also excellent and has some of those features Stanza is missing. Plus it has a large library of commercial and current books. It also lets you turn the page with an upward flick which I find more intuitive on the iPhone.
I hope Apple does add ebooks to iTMS as I do think there’d be enough market for them and there’s nothing more convenient than the iTMS.
On eReader, I read a whole book (700 odd eReader pages) in a single weekend. Okay, I admit, it was “Tarzan”, but it was free and I wanted to test the experience.
The fact that I read it over such a short time should indicate the experience was quite acceptable. The screen is as easy to read as any printed book, the only drag is having to turn the page three times as often.
I would buy and read books on my iPhone using eReader if the iTMS sold them. I will anyway (thru the eReader store) once my summer reading season rolls around (next month down here!).
As the author of the Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot novel, my eBook is now a featured work at Wattpad.com, which is a free competitor to Stanza, and I have to say that the reader response has been overwhelming to my novel. People like the convenience of their iPhone and they really don’t want to carry another device around so Amazon is basically hedging their bets with this acquisition. People also don’t like being locked into one company unless it’s Apple of course.
Cheers,
Erik John Bertel
floresgirl.com