[Update: Since I originally wrote this review, all the apps reviewed have upgraded to new versions, and addressed many of the complaints I list here. A more recent version of this column is located here.]

Steve Pendergrast of Fictionwise has reported that iPhones seem to be siphoning off Kindle users. But after looking at all of the major apps, it seems to me that the overall state of iPhone e-book options is still rather primitive.

Most of the readers are lacking useful features, and in some cases do not even render the text accurately. However, the clients are still under revision, so there’s hope for the near future.

For each e-reader, I will be looking at three aspects: readability, ease of use, and ease of loading up with content (both from the Web and self-made). Clicking the header link will open iTunes to the App Store listing for each application, which includes a screenshot. Shown here is eReader, from an earlier TeleRead writeup. I will update the present article with more screenshots as time permits. To avoid awkward phrasing, I will be referring to “iPhone” applications throughout this article, even though I am reviewing them on an iPod Touch.

eReader (v1.1)

eReader is the grande dame of iPhone e-reading applications, tracing its lineage back ten years to the original Peanut Reader for the Palm Pilot—much farther than any other iPhone reader can claim. Even if the iPhone version does not share any code with other eReaders, it has still had a much bigger head start when it comes to user-interface. That should count for something, right?

Readability

Similar to its predecessors, eReader offers three font faces in four sizes. These font faces are Georgia (serif), Helvetica (sans serif), and Marker Felt (a Comic Sans lookalike). The sizes are “small,” “medium,” “large,” and “huge.” Small Georgia can fit 23 lines on the screen in portrait mode, medium 18, large 14, and huge 12. Just as with Safari, the screen can also be rotated for reading in landscape mode—although unlike Safari, eReader will adjust even if you turn the device entirely upside-down.

It should be noted that changing font or font size will cause the entire book to need to be repaginated, which could take a minute or so depending on the size of your book. You will be unable to page up or down until it has caught up with your position in the book.

It is a little puzzling that eReader should spend one of its three font selections on a lookalike of the widely-reviled Comic Sans. Still, both of the other fonts are easily readable enough that no other font is really needed. My preference would be the serif font, Georgia, since serifs help guide the eyes along the rows of text and make it easier to read. But Helvetica is at least as easy to read as the text on the Palm version.

As for size, I can still read the text in any font even at its smallest setting if I hold it close, but my preference (and that of people with aging eyes) would probably be medium or large. Huge is about equivalent to the size of a large-print book, though only about a paragraph of text fits on the screen at a time. The fonts make use of anti-aliasing to appear quite clear no matter what the size.

Whether paragraphs are separated with indentation or double-spacing between paragraphs seems to be a function of the book itself. The eReader books I marked up myself are spaced, as is Stardust by Neil Gaiman—but Neptune Crossing by Jeffrey Carver and Balance by Mercedes Lackey are indented.

Ease of Use

The iPhone has no hardware buttons except the home button, and this is a slight handicap in terms of methods for paging through the book. My Clié and Nokia 770 had a thumb wheel and rocker switch respectively perfectly positioned for paging up or down in a text without having to change position of more than a finger. There is no such thing on the iPhone, so all apps have to rely on screen taps or other gestures to page up or down.

eReader only seems to know about two kinds of gestures: taps and swipes. By default, it is set up to recognize swipes to paginate and taps to bring up the menu bar, but these can be flipped in the settings. It can also change between tapping (or swiping) on the left and right halves of the screen or the upper and lower to control paging backward or forward, respectively.

Paging backward or forward is accompanied by an animation of the current screenful of test sliding to the right or left, as if it were a sheet of paper someone just quickly yanked out of the frame. This can be a little distracting at first, but it is also a quick way to know whether you accidentally mistapped and paged in the wrong direction before you start reading and realize the words don’t fit together. If the animation is too distracting, it can be disabled in the settings.

Other options in the settings screen include turning full justification on or off (I am not sure why they even included full justification, let alone had it turned on by default; with lines this width it only makes things less readable) and inverting the screen so it becomes white text on black background instead of the other way around. (If you are reading in the dark, this might be handy to avoid eyestrain.)

Inverting the screen can also be done from the menu bar. Other menu bar functions include opening the table of contents, search, search next, locking screen rotation, and opening the settings screen.

Conspicuous by its absence is a function I used quite often on the Palm version—the ability to jump to a specific page number. The Table of Contents works all right for books that have them, but some documents (for example, the novel Neptune Crossing) do not, or sometimes I want more finesse of control over where I jump to in the book. I hope Fictionwise will add this in their next version.

Also absent are any ability to place bookmarks or annotations (which I do not use so much, but others might), and any way to set different background colors beyond inverting the screen. Likewise, if the “author autograph” easter egg exists on the iPhone client, I have not been able to access it. (Though it is possible it might not, since the iPhone does not use a stylus.)

Adding Content

One thing the iPhone eReader has that the Palm version did not is the ability to organize its own library. Once a book is downloaded to the iPhone, it is kept in an index that can be sorted alphabetically by title or author, or by date of download.

As with the Kindle, the eReader supports adding content from its own stores, which include both eReader and Fictionwise. You do actually have to buy the content from the store separately, but the onboard Safari browser should work for that. To add content, all you need do is click the “+” button in the upper right of the library screen and tap the “eReader sites” button.

Here is where things may be a trifle unclear for the inexperienced user. The next screen prompts you to “Log in to your bookshelf using your eReader.com or Fictionwise.com account information.” It does not clarify how you pick which one you want if you have accounts on both.

After a few minutes, I figured it out: on eReader, your userID is your email address, whereas on Fictionwise it is a handle. With that in mind, all you need is to remember what ID and password you used for either one.

The client will remember whichever userID and password you entered last—but if you were last in the Fictionwise store and need to pull something from eReader, be prepared to do some thumbtyping. (It would be nice if you could set it to remember both IDs and passwords, then pick which site you wanted to log into. Perhaps in a future version.)

You can also add content from other websites, by choosing “Another site” instead of “eReader sites.” It will then prompt you to enter a URL. The URL does not have to lead directly to the .pdb file; if it is to the page containing it, eReader will launch a web browser session so you can navigate to it.

But what about installing content from your PC? Unless you have a webserver set up on your PC, eReader apparently will not support this. (To install my self-made books, I had to put them in the web directory of my LAN Linux box and point eReader at its IP address.)

I suppose it’s because the eReader format has always been aimed more toward professional publishers than do-it-yourselfers. Still, this is an oversight that should be addressed in a future version. Not everybody will be able to upload his book to a web server in order to install it.

Bookshelf (v1.1.903)

Next we come to an e-reading app that costs money. Zachary Bedell’s Bookshelf is a whopping $9.99 on the app store. The others are either free or included in the cost of the book. If it costs money, it should be good, right?

Bookshelf reads a large number of e-book formats, including text, HTML, DRM-free  MobiPocket, MS Word DOC, and rich text. The question is, does it read them well?

Readability

Bookshelf offers a much wider variety of font choices than eReader—including Georgia, Hevetica, Marker Felt, and a number of others; apparently these are all the system fonts available. However, some of these make little sense to use for book reading (for example, “DB LCD Temp”—who wants to read an entire book in pocket calculator font?) and others do not actually work at all (when I set the font to “STHeiti K” and went to view the text, it appeared as a series of dots—and when I went back to the setting menu it said my font was “null”). Sizes are given in points, ranging from 8 point (tiny) to 40 point (only 5 or 6 lines fit on the screen).

On the one hand, it is good to have a great degree of choice in just what font and what size you want the text to be. But on the other, the contrast between this and eReader’s setup is remarkable.

Sometimes, simpler is better, and this is one of those times—too many choices can only choose to confuse the user, especially taking into account how much rigamarole it is to change the font in Bookshelf in the first place. It might be best if Bedell restricted the choices to a smaller subset of reader-friendly fonts in a future version.

Font and size are controlled by a dialogue from the settings menu. It is very impressive-looking; the shading makes it look like a pair of ivory wheels that you can spin with your thumb. Nonetheless, it is a little annoying to have to click through two levels of setup screen to adjust the font, and then not be able to see what the result looks like until you click back through those screens to drop back to the text.

It might work better if the font dialogue could be called up directly from the reading screen; since the top half of it is transparent, it could serve as a preview of the text on the screen as it was being changed.

Once a font has been selected, however, the font faces Bookshelf and eReader have in common are just as readable in either application. As with eReader, Bookshelf will rotate the screen to any of the four possible orientations of the device.

Paragraphs have been at least double-spaced in all of the books I have opened with Bookshelf. When I open the Mobipocket version of Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson, one of the free e-books Tor gave away, it is properly spaced and very readable.

But when I open some Webscription books with it—the Liaden books by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller—there are three spaces between each paragraph instead of one, rendering the content a bit hard to read. When I opened Godstalk by P.C. Hodgell, all the text in the first part of the first chapter was centered.

According to Baen’s Arnold Bailey (and Bedell’s bug tracker) these bugs will be fixed in the next version, but until it is the app is of limited utility to me—those Baen books are a large part of what I wanted to read with it.

Ease of Use

Paging up and down in Bookshelf is done by thumb tapping on either the top or bottom of the screen. The text scrolls up or down in accordance with the direction you tap. (By default, tapping on the bottom pages down; flipping the somewhat-confusingly-named “Reverse Tap Scroll” switch in Settings reverses this.) You can also slide the screen up and down with your finger to scroll only part of the way. Tapping in the middle of the screen opens the menu bars.

Interestingly enough, the book is loaded in chunks about the size of a printed page, perhaps to keep the application’s memory footprint down. The beginning and end of each chunk is marked with a red arrow, and cannot be finger-slid past. Left and right arrows on the top menu bar allow you to jump to the next or last chunk.

In the bottom menu bar are options to go to the settings page, lock the screen rotation, view or add bookmarks, and start autoscroll for hands-free reading. The autoscroll section, in the lower right, is perhaps a touch too confusing. It is marked with a +, a -, and a “play” triangle, and my first guess was that the + and – controlled font size (rather than the autoscroll speed they actually control).

Again conspicuous by its absence is any method of jumping ahead in the book. Not only is there no “page selection” option that I could find, there is no way to reach the table of contents either, or to jump back to the beginning of the book from the middle of it.

If these functions do exist, they are hidden well enough that I could not find them—and they need to be totally obvious for the benefit of the average user. E-books have been around for more than a decade; there is no excuse in this day and age for a reader not to have at least rudimentary tools for navigating through a book.

I have already addressed the clunkiness of changing fonts. The settings page has similar (and therefore just as clunky) interfaces for changing the background/foreground color scheme and text encoding methods, as well as a “Data Management: Mark Unread” button. I have no idea what the “Mark Unread” button is for—and if I have a vague idea what text encoding is, I’m not sure why a user would want to change it from the reader client. (Isn’t it set from within the document being read?) This could be another case where too much information will serve to confuse the user.

Adding Content

This is the one area where Bookshelf really shines. Bookshelf comes with a Bonjour/TCP server application, that is fundamentally a stripped-down webserver for e-books. It is simple to set up (though I did have to uninstall and reinstall Bonjour on my Winbox to do so) and to add content which you can access from your LAN or, with a little router configuration, from anywhere on the net.

With a little experimentation, I was easily able to make the e-book directory of my hard drive available (password-protected) and download a book from it onto my device. And since the server contains the entire directory, I do not need to worry about having to manually add every book I want to install. (Oddly enough, I can access it through TCP, but the Bonjour version rejects my password. Oh well.)

But the shelfserver is also easy for publishers to integrate. That’s why Baen Books has set one up for its Free Library and Webscriptions, and there is also a public-domain-books server at iphonebookshelf.com. Just tap the icon in the lower right that looks like a folder with a down arrow from your documents list, and follow the instructions on the Webscriptions website.

The interface does still have a couple of problems, though. For one thing, it is not immediately obvious where you enter the userID and password for a protected server (you tap the red icon with a key on it). And when you have done that, you receive a screen with “userID” and “password” labels but nothing that looks like a blank to enter the userID or password in. (You just have to tap to the right of the label until it brings up the keyboard.)

Also, if you double-tap on the name of a bookshelf on the server, it will cause the app to lock up and crash. (This is on the list to be fixed in the next version.)

Stanza (v1.2)

This is the other major free e-book reader for the iPhone. It supports HTML, rich text, PDF, DRM-free LIT, DRM-free MobiPocket, Palm Doc, and the IPDF’s “ePub” format, among others—several more formats than Bookshelf, so far. And it’s free. The question is, do you get what you pay for? [Edit: I have since been informed that Stanza will cost $15 when it gets out of beta. Hopefully it will be a bit more usable by then.]

Readability

In its settings screen, Stanza offers the same font choices as Bookshelf, though in a straight “pick from list” format as opposed to Bookshelf’s fancy wheels. It does not offer sizes in points, but as a simple slider from smallest to largest.

Plus, Stanza is the only of the three readers reviewed so far to plus font size + and – buttons on its menu bar, so the size can be adjusted without having to leave the reading screen, and it also supports the “pinch” and “reverse pinch” methods of font shrinking and magnification where the others do not (though the screen blanks with a “loading” symbol as it redraws, and it is easy to accidentally flip back or forward a page if you do not touch the screen both fingers at exactly the same time).

This relative simplicity is made up for by Stanza’s settings screen being even more annoying to reach, but I’ll cover that in more detail in the “Ease of Use” section.

The screen rotates in all four directions as with the other e-reading apps; an option to lock it is found in the settings dialogue. Unlike the other apps, however, Stanza appears to have a little trouble getting it shoved around there. Instead of a smooth animation, the screen actually goes blank with a “loading” symbol on it for a few seconds until the new screen can draw itself.

Paragraphs are shown with a small indent; the default is full justification which looks lousy, though it can be disabled in the settings. That is fine as far as it goes. But where Stanza has its biggest problem, which would cause me to label it even less ready for prime-time than Bookshelf, is that it does not show italics. I loaded it with my MobiPocket copy of Mistborn, which has some internal dialogue sections in italics. On my iPhone, they weren’t.

And that, for me, is why I consider Stanza to be a complete nonstarter as far as readability is concerned. We are not back in the days of ASCII text and PalmDoc. There is no excuse for a modern e-reader program that can not do italics—none at all.

Ease of Use

Paging backward and forward in Stanza is done by tapping the left or right sides of the screen. Tapping in the middle opens the menu bars. Although the directions of paging can be swapped, the sections tapped to do so cannot be changed to top and bottom.

Paging forward or backward is accompanied by an animation where the current screen of text slides to the left or right, similar to eReader’s. Unlike eReader’s animation, the animation speed can be adjusted from the settings screen.

Stanza’s menu bars are relatively simple. The top bar contains the usual “back” button, the title of the current section of the book, and a “settings” gear. The bottom bar contains a combined table of contents/bookmarks listing, font – and + buttons, and a text search. Beneath it is a slider to move anywhere from the beginning to the end of the current section.

As I have said, this simplicity and functionality is good. But it is made up for by the unwieldiness of the settings screen. Unlike the other apps, Stanza actually followed Apple’s user-interface guidelines stating that application settings should be combined under the iPhone’s “Settings” app, rather than accessible from within the app itself.

Thus, tapping on that “Setup” gear in the upper-right corner takes you not to the Settings screen you would expect (and that you would get in eReader or Bookshelf), but to an “Edit Book” screen where you can change its title, author, or subjects, or delete it altogether—with no actual settings in sight.

Perhaps it is a little unfair to penalize Stanza when it is the other apps that actually “break the rules”—but in this case, those rules make no sense. I can see Apple’s reasoning—taking the setup out of the app itself makes the app seem simpler—but we have been conditioned through years of using PC and other PDA programs to look for settings within the app itself. If they are absent, a user is more likely to assume they are simply not there at all.

Under the current system, to make changes to Stanza’s setup requires you to press the “Home” button to return to the app launcher, find the Setup app (I have it on my second screen, so I have to slide over to view it), enter it, and then enter the Stanza sub-setup.

And once you make a change, you have to exit that, and go back to Stanza, to see the effects of the change. You can imagine how much “fun” this would make, say, checking to see what various different fonts look like.

While it is nice that the settings screen offers some nice options other apps don’t (for instance, adjusting the interline spacing and margin width), the rigamarole required to get into the settings makes it all a bit impractical. The creator of Stanza has said he will be moving some of the more commonly used settings back into Stanza in a future version; I think he should just move all of them.

In terms of moving through the text, the bookmark/table of contents section is good, as is the slider bar for navigating in this section, but there is still no option for choosing how much of the book as a whole to move through. It might be helpful if such a thing could be added.

Adding Content

Stanza’s desktop counterpart is an application called the Stanza Desktop. You use it to convert e-books you want to read into the “ePub” format for loading into Stanza. It may be that the Windows version of this client is what is killing the italics in the MobiPocket books I feed it, since they do not seem to have any italics in it either. (And when I tried feeding it a PDF, it promptly unwrapped all sections into single long paragraphs.)

Once a book has been loaded into Stanza Desktop, it can be shared via Bonjour, and then grabbed from Stanza by looking for “shared books.” That is how I loaded Mistborn onto my iPhone yesterday.

I tried to go back and share the PDF version to contrast it, but first the Desktop gave me some error about “java.net.BindException: Address already in use: jvm_bind” and then I got another error from the iPhone version trying to access it. That really is not good. When the would-be reader can’t even get an app to load, he is apt (“apped?”) to use another app.

Also not good is the limitation to sharing only one book at a time instead of an entire directory—undoubtedly because Stanza is actually an “ePub reader” that converts from other formats rather than read those formats natively like Bookshelf. Given that each book has to be converted before it can be shared, there may just not be any way around it.

Stanza fares somewhat better in the “online catalog” category; it can access and download public domain books from Feedbooks, and do so fairly easily. (Oddly enough, the books from Feedbooks seem to have italics and boldface intact, reinforcing my supposition that it is a flaw in the Stanza Desktop that keeps mine from transferring that way.)

I am a trifle disappointed in some aspects of Feedbook’s selection—they have the Maurice Leblanc Lupin novels in French but not in English—but that is a reflection on Feedbooks, not the reader app.

Note: Since this review was written, Stanza v1.3 has come out and addressed some of these issues. My look at v1.3 can be found here.

AppEngines Book (A Princess of Mars)

John Carter of Mars!

A recent TeleRead post featured an interview with a programmer who makes pre-packaged apps that contain the book and the reader, all in one convenient package. From the standpoint of a layperson who just wants to read a book, and not have to mess with potentially overcomplicated reader software, this is clearly a clever idea. Like those pre-packaged sealed MP3 player audiobooks, all the reader has to do is buy it and go.

Of course, the downside is that it will be locked to your iPhone or iTouch, and you will not be able to read it on anything else. From that perspective, it is like a whole new storie has been built onto the Tower of eBabel.

As it happens, A Princess of Mars—the first book in the John Carter series by Edgar Rice Burroughs—is available on the app store as a free download. So, I decided to take a look and compare it to the other readers on the list. (To note: I’m not sure that all the appbooks on the iTunes Store are published/created by the same person, however.)

Readability

The book is presented in a serif font, apparently Georgia—no other font can be selected. A wide range of text sizes is available; the smallest is smaller than eReader’s at 32 lines on the screen; the largest fits 16 lines (though the title bar at the top of the screen takes up some space, too).

The app does not support screen reorientation; straight-up portrait is all you get.

Ease of Use

The appbook is remarkably easy to use. To page up, tap the top half of the screen; to page down, tap the lower half. There is no paging animation, simply a quick replacement of the text currently on the screen with the next or previous page.

This book has the easiest text resizing of any e-book reading app I’ve yet seen on the iPhone. Simply pinch to shrink, unpinch to magnify. The size changes immediately—no loading time or having to dive into configuration screens to tweak it.

There is no settings screen at all, and no menu bar as such. There is a magnifying glass in the upper left to access text find, and a table of contents link in the upper right. There is no finer-grained method of navigation among pages, though there is a progress bar that shows how much of the book you have read.

There is no way to invert or change the screen color, either, though it is not something I would really miss—and if there are no bookmarks, at least the app remembers what page you last read if you close it and return to it.

Adding Content

You can not, of course, “add content” to this reader, per se—it is a prepackaged single-book item, software and content all in one. But on the other hand, adding a new book to your iPhone is as simple as going to the app store and buying it. The Apps Store “Book” category offers a large selection of AppEngine-format public domain titles for 99 cents, as well as a sprinkling of commercial titles at higher prices from publishers who have asked for their books to be released in that format.

Because the creator of these appbooks has to spend several hours custom-crafting each one, the ability to add your own content to the format is not ever likely to arise.

Compare and Contrast

As I said at the start, the state of e-book readers on the iPhone right now is rather primitive. Even the best, most polished one, eReader, is missing a couple of key features. Bookshelf needs some more work and bugfixes, and Stanza needs to solve some major usability issues before it can be considered even close to “ready for primetime.”

So, if I were to recommend an e-book reader at this point, I would of course recommend eReader, since it is free. Stanza is free, too, so you might as well install it—but I would not suggest using it as your primary reader, at least until they get the italics issue straightened out.

Is Bookshelf worth the $10? Probably. Assuming that they don’t charge for updates, certainly. I think it is definitely closer than Stanza to being useful, and it makes it easy to give yourself access to all your e-books on demand, not one at a time like Stanza.

And then there’s the ghost at the banquet, the AppEngine reader. The concept has attracted enmity from App Store reviewers for “daring” to sell public domain works, and from TeleRead commenters for further propagating the Tower of eBabel—but of all the reading apps I tested, it was by far the simplest, fastest, and easiest to use. It put me in mind of one of my favorite PalmDoc readers, CSpotRun.

But would I ever buy an AppEngine book? I’m not sure. Certainly not one of the public domain ones, which I could just as easily get for free (and in fact already have many of them, in the form of the DVDs I ordered from Blackmask.com before its demise).

One of them, a juvenile adventure novel called Emperor Dad, does interest me based on the Google books preview—but apart from paper, it’s only available as an app book, Kindle e-book, or PDF. The app book is only $5, but it’s the principle of the thing.

Wanted: Simplicity and Features

This leads me to consider what it is that all the e-book reader apps are missing. One of the key things is simplicity—there are a lot of options or controls that are not adequately explained or could be confusing to users. I think that eReader, Bookshelf, and Stanza could stand to take some lessons from the AppEngine book—not to mention Henry Thoreau. Simplify, simplify, simplify.

And in so doing, take advantage of what the iPhone has to offer. For instance, pinching and unpinching to zoom the screen. This is a gesture that many of the iPhone’s native apps support—Safari, Google Maps. It’s simple and intuitive, and people will be trained by Safari to try it on everything and be disappointed when it doesn’t work.

So why is it that, apart from AppEngine, only Stanza offers pinch-sizing to magnify or shrink fonts? (And why is Stanza’s implementation of it so slow and bloated?) Why interrupt our reading experience to make us pull up a settings screen for the sake of changing the font size?

Likewise, use the accelerometer. The orientation changing is a good start, but it’s only a start. I would like to be able to tilt the iPhone left or right to flip the page forward or back, so I don’t have to worry about where I need to tap with my thumb. Maybe tilt it up to open settings, down to return to my library. (To avoid accidents, it would have to be a sharp tilt, and of course be lockable just like rotation is for situations where it would not be useful.) Maybe even shake it like a magic 8-ball to open a random book!

In Conclusion

That is my rundown of the current iPhone e-book state of the art. Even if it is primitive so far, it shows promise, and I look forward to its subsequent improvement as patches and updates become available.


28 COMMENTS

  1. Not a bad review… a few comments:

    * Having the text encoding accessible might be necessary because not all source files are good about specifying the proper encoding… or specifying it incorrectly. 🙁 This might not be a problem if you have a server application translating the files before sending them, a la Stanza; however, Bookshelf tries to handle the formats directly and thus might have to deal with a screwed-up encoding.

    * Navigation is a problem with Bookshelf if you want to do a lot of jumping around in a book. The predecessor to Bookshelf on jailbroken iPhones had a slider for quick scanning within a chunk; the Bookshelf to-do tracking list at http://www.iphonebookshelf.com/trac/report/3 had restoring the slider to Bookshelf at one point, though I can’t find it there now.

    * Bookshelf presumably divides long files into chunks to avoid performance problems with very long files; its predecessor would sometimes take forever to open long books. The Baen practice of splitting the HTML version up into multiple files, one per chapter, was a significant advantage there. I suspect eReader and Stanza don’t have this problem because they break the text into page-size chunks already and just switch between them when you page, instead of allowing scrolling.

    * Likewise, split-file books eliminate some need for a TOC; if you back out of the chapter you’re reading into the main folder for the book, you can pick the file for chapter you want out of the list. This is the main use I’ve found for the ‘Mark Unread’ button, to keep track of what chapters you’ve read and not.

    * While the Stanza app on the iPhone feels more polished (aside from the settings issue) than Bookshelf, I just don’t care for the fixed-page-at-a-time reading method; I much prefer the continuous scroll, as it’s what I’m used to from both the Palm days (Mobipocket/iSilo/Plucker) and the Nokia IT days (FBReader) and I like seeing a bit of the previous screen when I page. So unless Stanza comes up with a continuous scroll method, probably not going to find it that useful.

  2. One important wrong point on eReader in your review is that it *does* support uploading your own content: I do this all the time. In the current version, your account on the eReader site has a section where you can upload your own eReader files; and these show up in the iPhone menu when you log on to download. It’s actually one of the simplest ways to add content out of any of the ebook readers on the iPhone – far easier than trying to add your own titles to Stanza, for instance.

  3. Chris: In eReader just hit the + which takes you to your bookshelf login. You will see any books you have added in the list with the title “Personal Content” at the bottom of the title.

    In Fictionwise go to your bookshelf and you will see a “Personal Content” button on the upper right. This will take you to your content page where you can add stuff from your computer.

  4. A few comments:

    Stanza seems to do MUCH better reading ePub formatted books than any of the other formats.

    A comment to Travis:
    I much prefer a “page at a time” approach to reading. (it’s just my opinion) that said, adding an option for other methods might be nice.

  5. Yes, Stanza is a native ePub format reader. It actually has to convert other formats into ePub before it can read them, which is why I think it has those problems with italics—the Windows version of the Stanza desktop doesn’t seem to notice them. I realize it’s just a beta, but it’s not a very useful app right now.

    (Since my only Mac is a Wallstreet II limited to OS 10.2.5, I won’t be able to try out the Mac version to see if it has the same problems.)

  6. You misseed out textReader, which, in my opinion is the best of all of them.

    http://code.google.com/p/iphonetextreader/

    I have used in on my 1.1.4 Jailbroken phone for months now and is ealily the best available. Using the volume buttons for tuning the pages is easy and using WinSCP to transfer books onto it is a breeze. You can also download files directly from sites such as Project Gutenberg.

    There is also a version available for 2.0 firmware if you have upgraded and Jailbroken.

  7. @rhoward2va: Public library e-book checkouts, if they’re like the ones my library has, use encrypted Mobipocket. At the moment, there is no iPhone reader for encrypted Mobipocket; the only encrypted Mobipocket readers come from Mobipocket themselves, but they are said to be at work on one for the iPhone.

    In the meanwhile, what you could do is install the desktop version of Mobipocket on your main computer, download the books to that, then use one of the scripts floating around out there to crack the DRM and put it on your iPhone as an unencrypted Mobipocket book, which Bookshelf will read.

  8. Mainly because iSilo came out for the iPhone after I had written this! If you’ve looked at later posts written by me, you’ll see I did mention it when it came out. I do have it, and will review it at some point. I used to use it exclusively on my PalmOS machines for reading Baen Webscription books.

    Perhaps I’ll gather it, and ReaddleDocs, and iPhonetextreader, and others up and do a “comprehensive review part two” at some point.

  9. hi !

    could you please give me step by step directions on how to load personal content into ereader using the personal web server on my XP machine ?

    Here is what i have done so far. I enabled IIS web server on my machine and added my /ebooks directoey as a virtual directory to my web server. I enabled READ / BROWSE directory permission for EVERYONE on this directory.

    Then i enabled wi-fi on my iphone and opened the ereader app. Clicked + followed by “another site” and entered the following address – http://ip_addr_of_my_machine/ebooks

    The iphone displayed the directory content. I clicked on a txt file name and it opened the text file in the browser. So far so good. But how do i download this file into ereader so that i can read it when not connected to my desktop via wi-fi ?

  10. If you want to load the file into eReader, it has to be converted into an eReader document. This means marking it up with eReader’s formatting codes and putting it through eReader’s Dropbook converter.

    There are a number of automatic PML converters that switch between various formats. Google “PML converter” to find some.

  11. hello. this is a great post. i’ve got a question you may be able to answer. we have developed a children’s picture book and i want to find a way to turn the book into an iphone app. is there software that will convert this for us and allow us to package it for download as an app? ideally, there would be some “page flip” technology, too.

  12. @suneet: You may want to read the later version of this article; it has been substantially revised to take account of changes and upgrades in the various reader apps.

    As to your question, there are ways to turn books into iPhone apps. However, since you have to be a licensed developer to create an app, you pretty much either have to write it yourself or contact someone who has already developed such an app. One such contact is Lexcycle, the makers of Stanza. They have developed a wrapper version of Stanza that has been deployed as part of David Pogue’s iPhone: The Missing Manual app-book.

    Beyond that, take a look at some of the other app-books that can be bought from the App Store, see if there are any whose interface you particularly like, then get in touch with their developer about the possibility of doing the same for your children’s book.

  13. Is there simple any way that I can read ebooks in PDF file on my iphone, other than through opening the pdf in an email. Id like to get them opened through a proper ereader app, if possible.
    Cheers

  14. Yes, Lynsay. You can use iSilo, Air Sharing, or a number of other apps available through the app store to read them. These apps do tend to cost money, though, and they’ll only read relatively simple book PDFs, not the huge overbloated monstrosities that are most role-playing game books.

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