Everybody is raving about the new Stanza iPad app, so it is refreshing to read a review that says it’s OK, but could be better.
The always-excellent Amazon Kindle Review has a long article on this which concludes:
Think there are a few main reasons Stanza is no longer my reading app of choice –
Stanza is the best reading app for the iPhone on the iPad. It’s a very different sized device and Stanza’s team haven’t really taken that into account.
Stanza hasn’t figured out the 150 options out of their 300 options that should be removed. In fact, they could remove 75% of their options and they’d end up much better off.
Kindle for iPad and iBooks do things that take advantage of the iPad – With iBooks it’s the two pages at a time view and with Kindle for iPad it’s the way the whole app uses the extra space and focuses on a design that brings the book to the forefront. Stanza doesn’t.
Kindle for iPad put all its effort into choosing one great font (Caecilia) and making three great themes and laying out things very well. iBooks put all its effort into making the app look great and animating page turns and making fancy bookshelves. Stanza, on the other hand, put all its effort into providing the user with a ton of choice – However, it missed out on providing users the option to do next to nothing and still get a very solid, very readable app.
There’s not enough evolution. It’s still a great app with lots of options – However, it’s debatable whether it’s better than its previous version. In fact, it might even be a little bit worse.
Stanza is by no means a bad app – it’s just that it has lost its grasp on #1. Kindle for iPad is 1st. Stanza and B&N are a joint 2nd. iBooks is 4th unless your DNA has a strand of Apple running through it – in which case iBooks is #1 for you.
While I agree with most of your points, I will say that for fictionwise.com and ereader.com .pdb file content, Stanza is still the best for the iPad. I was able to load 298 pdb files that I have purchased from fictionwise with no problems. I do think that you have hit the mark that the previous iteration of Stanza for the iPhone and iPod Touch did have a better user interface and customization were a lot easier to perform. They could really loose the extra group that they added or at least let the user delete them. There is also a bug when editing an author’s name. The ok button is missing from the pop-up when you click save.
The new Stanza is a definite improvement in my opinion. In the end there is no perfect reader for all, but Stanza helps by allowing customization even for the less than fully technical. I find the Amazon app to be rather problematic since I can’t even change the typestyle, just the size. Stanza, on the other hand, let’s me use a nice bold type. On my wish list would be double pages.
Thanks,
David
I agree with Vic on this note…
“I will say that for fictionwise.com and ereader.com .pdb file content, Stanza is still the best for the iPad.”
That’s the whole point of Stanza is it supports the small eBook Retailers. Fictionwise and Omilit and so on can sell you DRM eBooks that work with it seamlessly.
Stanza was the first and still the best for people who want a more democratic approach to buy and read eBooks from the other smaller more focused eBook Retailers out there. Even if it means still having to buy a DRM.
If you buy Amazon eBooks then of course you will profess Kindle and their apps are the best. If you buy Apple iBooks then you will use their app. It’s just about being locked in.
Stanza supports DRM but is even less locked in to a particular retailer.
Come on. Stanza for the iPad is great in my opinion. I can read all but my Sony ebooks on my iPad. Using txtr for the iPhone is not that great. Still waiting for the iPad version. But back to Stanza. I’m quite surprised that Amazon would do this. To me it shows they’re willing to be flexible. Next up will be ADE Adobe books. Amazon sees it’s all about selling the books. Keeping their customer base happy. Now, if only publishers would see this. We will all be better off. Get rid of those ridiculous geo-restrictions and start selling books again at reasonable prices.
Stanza is awesome for one particular reason: You can load your own ebooks over the web (dropbox, etc). I love iBooks’ look and feel, but having to connect to my laptop to move
books over is a pain.
Stanza has lots of rendering bugs, but the easy integration with DropBox/OPDS raises it above the average for those with large collections. For me, it is the least flawed of the readers so far, but I continue to monitor the others in hopes of improvements.
Stanza allows me to set left justification. The Kindle lost me as a user by forcing full justification.
The mere presence of the new version of Stanza on the iPad breaks PDF reader and forwarding functionality in Mail. Only the first page of PDF attachments are displayed, and forwarding does not work. “Open in” is also not available. Removing Stanza instantly restores all Mail functionality.