iPhonefreak width="190"

Price: Free
Links: Developer | iTunes

A few weeks ago I read Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities”, but there was no paper involved. I also didn’t go out and spend a ton of money on the Amazon Kindle or another device like it. In fact, I didn’t buy anything. I simply downloaded the free application “Stanza” to my iPhone and used it to download the book from Project Gutenberg.

Despite what you’d think, reading on the iPhone’s small screen isn’t all that bad. Stanza allows you to adjust the colors, font, and spacing to your liking. While reading the menu’s are hidden to allow the whole screen to be used for text, but can be easily accessed by taping the middle of the screen. Page turning can be done easily by tapping either the left or right side of the screen. You can also slide out menus to get a slider bar to quickly skip through several pages or skip to a different chapter. If you hit the home button while reading, your position is saved and the app will automatically return to it when it’s opened next.

You can select between books on the library screen where you can view books by title, author, subject, or view the most recently opened books. Flipping the phone horizontal shows a cover flow view of the book covers similar to the iPod app.

As I mentioned, the app can download free books from Project Gutenberg and several other sites. They’ve also recently added the ability to buy copyrighted books from eReader straight from your iPhone, as well as access eReader books you’ve bought on your computer. While the store doesn’t have a huge variety, it’s better than nothing.

The true usefulness of Stanza, however, wasn’t revealed until I was able to start putting my own books and documents onto my iPhone. The desktop application can open and export a wide variety of ebook and text files (including PDF, DOC, LIT, TXT, HTML, etc…). It can then send those over a wireless network to your iPhone. It even does a fair job of parsing out the author, title, and chapters from less sophisticated formats by looking for clues in the file.

The biggest pain in the neck with this book sharing (besides the technical problems noted below), is that the position where you left off can’t be synced. Say you read a little bit on the iPhone, you’ll have to manually find that position when you go back to reading on the computer and vice versa.

Note: The desktop applications are currently in beta, and may cost money at a later date. I’ve also had some trouble sharing books to my iPhone unless a create an ad-hoc wireless network to share over.