Amazon Buys iPhone E-Book Reader Stanza
Amazon liked the iPhone E-Book Reader Stanza so much, they didn't just buy the app, they bought the whole company! That's what the New York Times makes it sound like, quoting Amazon spokesperson, Cinthia Portugal:
“It’s very early days for e-books, and we believe there is a lot of innovation ahead of us. [...] Lexcycle is a smart, innovative company. and we look forward to working with them to innovate on behalf of readers.”
Translation: Amazon, not content with Kindle, wants to own the E-Book space. All books space, actually. All space in general, pretty much.
Lexcycle, for their part, claim not to be making any changes to the Stanza iPhone users all know and love.
But how do we feel about putting all our E-Books in one megacorp's basket?
Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler.
| Tweet |
|
|
Leave a Reply
Note: Comments must be civil, respectful, and on-topic. If a comment does not add to the conversation, if it contains spam advertising, or inappropriate language or content, it will be removed. Insulting the topic, author, staff, site, network, or other commenters will result in the comment being marked as spam and potential prevent future comments from appearing on the site. Do not post as a business or your comment will likely be confused with spam. Comments containing links may be held for moderation. Relax, enjoy, and share in the discussion.
As long as eReader doesn't go away. I have a massive personal content library and just the thought of formatting pml into another medium makes me cry.
Seems I spoke too soon. Stanza supports eReader. It's possible they didn't when the app first came out and that's what I remember.
They actually have a desktop client that eReader lacks! Heck, I might switch now!
I was going to comment the other day about Stanza when Rene mentioned Kindle for the Iphone.
I held off, because I wanted to evaluate Kindle. Having done so, I have to say that Stanza is head and shoulders above the Kindle app in almost every way.
Stanza is just easier to use in all respects. The interface is brilliantly simple to use - tap right side to page forward, tap left side to page back. Tap center for menu. Instant brightness adjustment by sliding finger up and down. Zoom via the normal methods.
Kindle requires a swipe to page forward (harder to do one handed), and you have to leave the app to change brightness.
Stanza goes out of its way to put free material into your hands, but also allows access to paid ebooks from a variety of sources. (15 different sources). You can add sources, such as any website hosting ebooks in a variety of formats.
Kindle lets you get your books from Amazon. End of story. And Amazon does not lift a finger to provide free content. (You can find it, but its hard).
With Stanza you can buy books right in Stanza, With Kindle you have to wander around the wasteland of Amazon searching for Kindle books in Safari, until you get sick of it and resort to your desktop to buy a book. Its pathetic.
Stanza has a desktop application as well, and with it you can share books between the phone and the computer via Bonjour. (At last a use for that miserable Bonjour!!!). The windows version pretty much sucks, the Mac version may be better.). It will read a variety of document formats from your hard drive and make them down loadable to the iphone over your wifi. Awesome.
No clue how you might share with your desktop with Kindle.
The complete built in Dictionary of Stanza lets you look up any word in the text by tapping it, and holding. No such feature in Kindle.
I will be REALLY PISSED if Amazon horks over Stanza or shuts it down in favor of their miserable iPhone Kindle version.
Stanza is a far better app and a joy to read. It has almost all of Gutenberg online and instantly available, and the interface is brilliant.
I consider this to be good news, as it seems to point to an eventual marriage between Stanza (better e-reader than Kindle) and Amazon. I hope Stanza retains support for vairous formats (coming from tidbits of a varied e-book library) and adds the possibility to buy books from within the app.
@Plasmanut:
I would rather have Google own Stanza than Amazon.
In fact I was just fine with Lexcycle owning it.
Love Stanza!
Clearly a great move for amazon.
I prefer to have access to Amazon thru Stanza without the lock outs that some Amazon users have experienced.
Yay for progress.
@Rocky:
What makes you so sure that access to Amazon via Stanza won't get lockouts as well?
And if that could happen, why is this a good move?
( http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=44350&highlight=amazon+banning )
i personally love ereader itself i do wish they had more books i would read i actually prefer that to reading a normal book. i didnt like kindle at all it was like flipping through pdf in mail no highlight and i use that a ton. i will check out stanza but dont see anything that would make me switch other then the selection. i would really prefer to have just one reader instead of 2 so i am ok with it as long as amazon doesnt get retarded.
I hope that Stanza doesn't end up losing features under Amazon. It's great to have all the features, but Stanza's not a model of interface simplicity. You'd never mistake it for an Apple product. Still, it's the best there is right now.
One thing that really bugged me about the Kindle app is that some books have full-justified text, which is a readabilty and aesthetic disaster with such short line lengths. I read that Amazon lets publishers specify what justification to use- big mistake. I sure hope Stanza doesn't get shackled to dumb commercial decisions like that.
Ha- I just noticed that The iPhone Blog uses full text justification for its iPhone version- guys, please turn that off! Use left justify- much more readable!
Seconded!
There goes a competitive electronic distribution channel to Amazon. So much for competition.
Personally my favorite way to read on my iPhone is using the BeamItDown reader. There are certain drawbacks of course. You can not add your own PDF or ebooks to read on it. The only titles fir it at this point are open source free books and they of course make you pay for them. However, the interface is so slick. Pages are not turned they scroll. The rate of scroll is based on the tilt of your iPhone. Want to speed up a slight tilt back and the reader responds and vice versa. To stop a simple touch to the screen will do then you can use your finger to scroll through the text like it is a web page. I really love it. If there was a way to convert PDF docs to be able to read them in this format it would be perfect.
We've invented better stuff now, stop readin!!
@andrew
I installed Stanza. Both iPhone and desktop, and when it comes to eReader content, eReader app kicks Stanza's puny little butt. Stanza would NOT remember orientation settings between sessions. Oh sure, I could lock it at landscape and it would stay there, but exit and re-enter the app, and it would revert to whatever orientation the phone was in when you opened it. Tap on Stanza while holding the phone upright and your book would be portrait. And it would be LOCKED at portrait. You would either have to unlock the orientation rotate to landscape and re-lock, or exit and launch the app holding the phone on its side.
I'm not even going in to what it did to my formatting and line breaks in the book itself.
@iceboke Yes, hoping for progress.
With Stanza & eReader setting a higher user experience, Amazon would strive for improvements.
We can hope.
Barns & Noble recently bought eReader/Fictionwize, so this might get interesting- both eReader and Stanza should eventually have huge libraries at their disposal, and both are great readers (though I prefer eReader).
@MCSwan: eReader has apps for Windows and Mac OS X, so you don't have to use Stanza Desktop.
@MCSwan:
Yes, that is the expected behavior for a rotation Lock. They got it right.
Pisses me off when I lay roll onto my side in the hammock on a lazy summer read only to have the damn page flip as well.
@icebike
You're missing the point. Yes, I expect it to stay where it is when I lock it in landscape. And it does. The problem exists when I also expect to STILL be locked in landscape the next time I launch the app. Stanza absolutely will not do that.
@ckd
I meant a desktop app to transfer/manage my library on to the iPhone. eReader does not have this, you must manage the library (purchased as well as personal content) through the eReader website.
I was looking for a local way to get my books onto my iPhone. Stanza did do this flawlessly, but the hash it made of my books outweighed this functionality.
The issue is NOT the desktop version of Stanza, it's the iPhone version! Mobile is the future, it's now. Who's going to pull out a laptop on a bus to read an ebook? Who wants to try to buy an ebook from Amazon on a bus with a laptop? So much easier with Stanza on an iPhone.
Now, another great product in the hands of a huge company, to be watered down, "fixed", DRM'ed, on and on. Stanza will never be the same.
I usually dont post in Blogs but your blog forced me to, amazing work.. beautiful
Your RSS feed is not work in my browser (google chrome) how can I mend it?
You also do not have to spend a lot of cash for their services.