iPhone App Reviews Blog

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I’ve been a sucker for ebooks for many years now but I’ve had a tough time finding a comfortable, viable way to read them. I have no interest in buying the bulky and heinous looking Kindle and I’ve tried other ebook readers such as Microsoft’s back in the days when I used Compaq iPaqs as my PDA of choice. But nothing has really clicked for me over time.

Until now.

Stanza, from Lexcycle Inc., is a free ebook reader app for the iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPod Touch. Stanza lets you pick from more than 100,000 books via its online catalogue. Some are free and some you have to buy. It also lets you read book summaries, change the book cover, bookmark your place in a book, customize the way you read books (colors, fonts, etc.) and it also has support for various languages including English, Swedish, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese and Danish.

Change how your iPhone displays your ebooks.

Plus you can share books and other documents over your wi-fi network, sort your library and create custom collections to track your books and create reading lists. And you can buy books online and download them right to your Stanza library. Stanza does just about everything you need an ebook reader to do.

Let’s take a closer look at what Stanza has to offer.

Your Library
When you first start Stanza the Library page will load up and you’ll see a list of choices you can click:

Titles
Authors
Subjects
Latest Reads
Online Catalog
Shared Books
Recent Downloads

You can choose from these or click the + button to add another collection to Stanza.

The Titles, Subjects, Authors and Latest Reads show books that you have already downloaded (see more below). Using the Library is very simple and straightforward. It’s easy to view your books the way you want.

But how do you get books to fill your library in the first place?

Finding Books & Other Content

You can download many books onto your iPhone using Stanza.

The best way to get books is to use Stanza’s Online Catalog. Click the Online Catalog selection from the Library and you’ll see a list of places you can get books from:

Fictionwise Book Store
Free Harlequin Love Stories
Random House Free Library
All Romance eBooks
Free Books by Feedbooks
Newspapers & Magazines
Project Gutenberg
Books from Munseys
Original Books and Stories
Books from BookGlutton
Pan Macmillan Tasters
Now a Major Motion Picture
Spread the Word

The total number of books to choose from is well over 100,000. That’s enough to keep anybody busy reading for quite a while. To download a book just pick the source you want, find the book and then click the Download button. It’s that simple.

Some books are totally free and you’ll get the full text of the book. Others are sample chapters designed to give you a taste of the book with the option to buy the full text.

You can also read some content from newspapers and magazines such as the following:

The Atlantic
The BBC
The Guardian
Tech News
USA Today
The Wall Street Journal

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(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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