5 reasons why Stanza might be my iPhone ebook app of choice

Jan 31 2009

I make no secret about how much I love my iPhone, and how that love has only grown since I loaded it with the eReader application from Fictionwise (which I reviewed in detail here). But last night I decided to give the Stanza ebook reader a try as well. I have read a lot of good things about Stanza, so I thought, why not see what all the excitement is about?

While I haven’t read any ebooks using Stanza yet (I have read several on eReader, however), I’m already seeing just how powerful an application Stanza is. Here are a few things that really stand out for me:

1. Stanza allows you to download ebooks directly on the iPhone, without using a computer.

2. Stanza is compatible with a wide variety of formats, including epub, which I have a growing interest in.

3. Stanza is able to download ebooks (both free and paid) from a vast number of websites.

4. Stanza seems to be more "publisher friendly" meaning even a loner like myself can publish an ebook and anyone else with Stanza will be able to download and read it.

5. Stanza appears to have a very friendly UI and easy to use (okay, this is also true of eReader).

But my real draw to the Stanza ebook reading application is that it can read epub and multiple other formats. I would love to write and publish an ebook sometime in the future, and epub is definitely the way to go. It seems that getting a self-published book onto Stanza is much less cumbersome than the other apps out there.

Of course, I just downloaded the app last night and played around with it for a while, but haven’t read a novel on it yet or anything. So I’m keeping an open mind and will write a more detailed review when I get a book or two under my belt.

My first impressions of Stanza are very good, and they are in line with what others are saying – a good ebook program that doesn’t tether you to one format or evil DRM!

Any other Stanza users out there? What are your impressions of the app? How do you think it stacks up to eReader? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts.

2 Responses

Hi! Not only is Stanza great as a reader, it is fantastic as an author.
I am a very happy indie author who has a book available on the iPhone – published as an ebook through Smashwords which is a catalogue on Stanza. You can publish for free by uploading a word document, which is converted into multiple ebook formats. I have written a post on how to do this here
http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2009/01/08/smashwords/
If you want evidence, check out author Joanna Penn under the Smashwords catalogue. I had my book published there within about an hour. You and your readers can too!
iPhone and Stanza are giving the power (and the revenue) back to authors – it’s a great time to write!

Joanna Penn 2/1/2009 10:09 pm
Hey, good info… I love ebooks, I prefer them to real books because they’re so widely available and they are free! That’s the great thing. I downloaded a few ebooks from a site called ebookdl.net, pretty cool.

Micheal 7/10/2010 4:09 pm