Stanza

Stanza is another (of many) book readers for the iPhone. In my opinion, it's a step up from Kindle for iPhone. I'm currently reading my third full novel, but haven't tried technical books. Here's my impressions.

Strengths

• Huge online catalog, includes the Gutenberg collection of 25,000 free classics

• Direct purchase from the iPhone, including books from O'Reilly

• Nice (1 pixel) progress bar along the bottom

• Flips to horizontal, vertical, upside down

• Free

Just OK

• Text look, legibility, etc.

• Page turning (tap left or right edge of screen)

• Font size options

Weaknesses

• Cover art, book jackets, title page, front matter poorly formatted and displayed

• Classics were apparently scanned, and contain frequent scanning errors

• Recent version crashes when trying to set options

Amazon purchased Lexcycle, the company that created Stanza, in late April. Perhaps this will lead to a much improved Kindle application on the iPhone. Now that iPhone 3 is out, direct purchase from Amazon for the iPhone seems likely.