Mac Desktops
Smartphones
Cameras
Camcorders
Mac Laptops
iPad & Tablets
HDTV
Networking & Wireless
iPods
iPhone Apps
Printers
Storage
iPad, iPod touch, & iPhone app reviews from our editors—and you!
StanzaCurrent Version: 3.2
See more Free Books app reviews »
Purchase popular new books from a selection of over 50,000 contemporary titles available in various partner stores, or choose from an additional 50,000 free classics and recent original works available from Project Gutenberg, Feedbooks, and many other sources. Store and categorize hundreds of books in the organizer, and transfer your own ePub, eReader, PDF, Comic Book Archive (CBR & CBZ), and DjVu books from your Mac or PC to Stanza by dragging & dropping the files into the "File Sharing" section of the "Apps" tab of your device in iTunes.
Stanza has been recognized by numerous organizations:
• Time Magazine lists Stanza as one of their "Top 11 iPhone Applications"
• Stanza is a PC Magazine "Editor's Choice" and one of their "21 cool iPhone Apps"
• The New York Times features Stanza: "Tip of the Week: Turn Your iPhone Into an e-Book"
• Wired features Stanza in their "10 Most Awesome iPhone Apps of 2008" article
• Forbes Magazine lauds Stanza, saying: "Stanza, like Kindle, lets users download new content directly to their device."
• Apple lists Stanza in their collection of "iTunes 2008 Top Apps"
• Stanza is a Macworld reader's favorite in: "Our Favorite iPhone Apps: Your turn"
• Stanza won the 2008 award for "Best Free App" at BestAppEver.com, where they write: "Stanza has redefined how everyone thinks about reading on a mobile device."
Stanza has additionally been praised by CNET, the Washington Post, Ars Technica, the Boston Globe, Information Week, and PC Magazine's AppScout.
Your entire summer reading, your class syllabus for the whole year, all the reference material you will ever need: all at your fingertips. Literally.
Stanza Review
E-reader offers plesant alternative to Kindle, iBooks
Stanza, now a universal app for the iPhone and iPad alike, is an e-reader from Lexcycle. Lexcycle, in turn, has been bought by Amazon since our first review of the then iPhone-only Stanza appeared. But Stanza’s feature set differs notably from Amazon’s Kindle app.
The most obvious difference is Stanza’s lack of integration with its own dedicated e-book store. The app connects to a variety of online sources for free and paid books, and can read other books in non-DRM-protected ePub, eReader, PDF, Comic Book Archive, and DjVu formats. That means you can’t read iBookstore purchases or Kindle store books in Stanza, but you can read free books from Project Gutenberg, the Random House Free Library, and buy books within the app from Fictionwise, BooksOnBoard, and O’Reilly, among others. It’s a far cry from the far more robust Kindle bookstore (with 600,000 titles), or even Apple’s iBookstore (with “tens of thousands” of titles)—but if you can find books that you want to read, that’s all that matters. I do find it annoying that, even when afforded all the screen real estate that the iPad provides, Stanza doesn’t show book prices in most views when you shop—you need to tap into the individual book itself to find out how much it costs.
Book-Mobile: Stanza doesn’t have the dedicated e-bookstores that iBooks and Kindle offer, but it does let you read free books from a number of sources.
Where Stanza bests its competitors is in its customizations. The app sports impressive display controls: You can choose from more than 40 fonts (although, admittedly, you’ll likely never want to read a book in Marker Felt or some of the other more whimsical fonts offered). You can also adjust not just font size, but also font and background colors. Stanza offers numerous reading themes, all of which you can further customize, saving settings for daytime and nighttime reading. I tweaked both defaults—switching to a sepia-toned background for daytime reading, and dark gray on black for night. Stanza even lets you set a background image, but I can’t imagine most sane readers would go that route. And in a particularly clever touch, swiping up and down on the screen adjusts the screen’s brightness.
You can also control text justifications, line spacing, paragraph spacing, indent width, and margins. To date, Stanza is the only iOS e-reading app that I’ll enable full justification on, because the app supports automatic hyphenation. (Without hyphenation, it’s necessary to employ ridiculous word spacing, depending on the words in a given line, to keep the right side flush.)
While all those features are great, Stanza also includes a few frustrations. It’s impossible to leave the app’s controls visible while you read, since that view also superimposes a dark info box smack dab in the center of the text. Kindle and iBooks both allow you to toggle controls in and out of view without obscuring the book’s text. Making this even more frustrating is that that Stanza is a bit sensitive about recognizing center taps; the “touch zones” for pagination are too large for my tastes; if I’m just a hair off-center when tapping and unintentionally turn the page.
In Control: Stanza sports impressive display controls, but it’s impossible to leave the app’s controls visible while you read, as that places an info box over the text.
On the iPad’s large screen, I find landscape reading unmanageable; the column of text is just too wide to read manageably. Since you can’t set the margins separately for portrait and landscape, I simply stuck with portrait mode for most of my reading. On the iPhone, though, I found a comfortable margin where reading in either orientation with Stanza felt fine.
In spite of its minor flaws, Stanza offers a very pleasant reading experience. My general requirement for any e-reading app or device is that it be able to fade away, and not distract in any way from enjoying the text you’re reading—and Stanza certainly passes that test. Regardless of the app I’m using, I much prefer reading on the iPad to the iPhone, but both versions of the app work quite well.
The most significant difference between Stanza and its big-name competition is the book-source required. Stanza feels a bit more “do-it-yourself”-focused, since you’ll need to dig a bit more to find books to read. If that approach suits you, Stanza won’t disappoint.
[Lex Friedman is a frequent Macworld contributor.]
Critic Reviews of Stanza iPhone App
No critic reviews from around the web found
User Reviews of Stanza iPhone App
Our user review snapshot
Our user reviews IN DETAIL:
Best for reading
I have a number of eBook readers on my Touch, but I keep coming back to Stanza. Sure, it would nice if Stanza had a better way to distinguish between tapping on the center of the screen to bring up the menu and tapping on the side to change pages. Never the less, the ability to size the text easily, to readily switch between day and night modes, to change text and background colors all make Stanza the best eBook reader I've found for reading, and that's what matters when your screen holds only a part of a physical book page.
5 stars plus
The only thing to make this app better would be cross syncing across devices. Also, they used to have a desktop version which would send the books "over the air" from the computer to the device. It would be nice if they brought it back, give us another way of adding content. Overall, a fantastic reader.
Choosing fonts
You summed up what's wrong with Stanza, the Kindle, iBooks, and virtually all the other ereaders with these words: "You can choose from more than 40 fonts." As a reader, I don't want to choose fonts any more than I want to choose the words. I don't want the books I read to all be in bland Palatino or something wild. I want someone to take the time to find the right font for the book just like the author chooses the right words. This choose your font madness reminds me of a similar foolish fad when I was a kid--the choose your own plot book. At certain points you'd be asked, "If you want John to be the murderer, turn to page 123...." It bombed dreadfully. Choose your font is just as silly and in the long run just as doomed. What's really bizarre is that Apple, whose early Macs survived only because they allowing book designers to choose these sorts of things for us more easily, is one of the worst offenders. iBooks apparently goes out of its way to prevent book designers from specifying the most important font of all, that of the body text. Apple staff are reported to have said that they're doing that to protect readers from bad font choices by book designers. It's Apple that makes the bad choices. Unlike Stanza, iBooks can't hyphenate justified text, so when Apple forced justification on their free copy of Winnie the Pooh, it looked awful, with some words compressed horribly on one line and space out way too far on the next. Of course, allowing book designers to choose the right font is only part of the problem. ePub is at the same stage in development as HTML 1.0, with something similar to the incompatible browser wars developing. Until ePub is up to publishing more than novels, any good ereader and any decent online bookstore should be distributing books as PDFs that are readable on Kindles and iPads, with special software that strips out the added formatting an makes them look no more stripped down that ePub books already look.
Great Appp But ...
I use Stanza all the time. But for the life of me I can't see a way to synch iPad and iPhone ..... not just library but the page number of current read. Given the iPad's arrival this is an important feature .... that iPhone/iPad Kindle does very well.
My first, best e-reader
I have been using Stanza since I first got my iPod touch, almost two years ago, and, until recently, was the only e-book reader I used, despite the fact that I downloaded both the B&N e-reader and Kindle for iPhone some time ago. I was just not interested in getting locked into a proprietary format for my e-books, and I was able to (legally) acquire e-books from multiple sources in multiple formats that all just worked in Stanza. In addition to the sources for free e-books listed in the review, I strongly suggest the Baen Free Library if you enjoy SciFi/Fantasy books. They have the first book from an overwhelming number of SciFi & Fantasy series available for free on their website. This is, of course, designed to get you hooked on the series, but its free. And that is the best thing about Stanza: the opportunity to explore classics and new works and e-book manuals and anything else that is DRM-free. Yes, I have downloaded several free selections for the other two readers to test them out, but besides the paltry selection of free titles, the big difference is Stanza is both more complex in terms of customization options, and simpler in terms of basic use. I only hope Amazon doesn't kill Stanza to feed the Kindle machine.
Best E-Reader Out There
Absolutely the best e-reader out there for the iPhone. Yea, it's a bit difficult getting some content in there - but once you get it in there, it's the cleanest interface out there.
An amazing app
I started using Stanza shortly after I got my iPhone in November 2008. Since then I have read about 30 books. I also have the Kindle for iPhone and I feel that Stanza is far superior. It is limited in it's new title selection compared to Kindle, but I love the ability to customize almost everything when reading a book. The ability to change font size & background color/brightness is wonderful in low light situations. I am never without a book to read, regardless of where I am.
A must-have ereader app
I was looking for a standalone ereader, dismissing the Sony Reader and nook (fonts weren't large enough) and the Kindle (ditto, also tends to delete books you've bought from your library without warning). I thought I'd have to spend another $300 one one... until I found this little gem. // As others have noted, this is definitely the ereader to use if you're at all visually impaired. I have low vision, which means that I need to have things enlarged and in a thick-stroke font. Amazon's Kindle app artificially limits your choice and size of fonts; like Microsoft Help, the largest font size is barely legible for someone with weak or aging eyes. But Stanza has no artificial restrictions on fonts and size: you can enlarge the text enough so that it's readable to all but the most impaired of bibliophiles. Portrait and landscape views are supported seamlessly. Pictures are capable of display, too, as the included "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" demonstrates. The color of the text and field can also be changed; I settled on Arial MT Rounded Bold, on a Black background, with Green Yellow text. People with better vision who want a more decorative reading experience can use one of the patterned or textured paper styles built in. On top of all that, you can set layout options such as line spacing and paragraph indentation to make the reading experience as comfortable as you need it to be. // As if that weren't enough, it comes with links to bookstores-- not only paid sites but free sites, like Project Gutenberg. Thus, if all you really want to read on your iPhone is the classics, this is a no-brainer; the selection is simple and there's a huge variety out there of some of the best books in the English language. Students and critical readers will appreciate the informative About This Book page, and also the ability to make annotations. // There are one or two things missing. I'd love to see an automatically scrolling view, sort of a TelePrompTer style. The text rendering isn't 100% perfect: when there's a large letter starting out a chapter, it applies the paragraph indentation to the rest of the word. And often the line breaks are poorly placed, as if the source text had extraneous carriage returns that weren't well handled. // But while I wouldn't mind these few issues being resolved, I'm overjoyed to have an application of this high a caliber-- and to have it for free. Thank you, Lexcycle!
Best ereader on iphone hands down
I have tried the main 3 iphone ereader apps and Stanza is clearly the best. I'm a visually impaired and just for the fact that you can pick all kinds of different fonts and make the font really large unlike the other ereaders. You can mak the text so large that it only has 5-6 words on the page. Most would never use that high of a font size but I'm glad it's there. The book selection is good with the number of different sources you can get them although I will say the prices are high for new releases. I've only bought one book only because it wasn't available on audible but I can see myself getting more books to read on my iphone with Stanza. Great app! a must have for any ipod touch or iphone owner who likes to read and doesn't already have an ereader device.
A near perfect app
There are very few truly all five star free apps. This is one of them. Its been around long enough to be trusted and the library of options is impressive. You can go wrong including this app in your home page.
Best tested
Of the various book apps I have tried, this is my favorite. Great interface and very configurable, with awesome access to huge paid and free book databases. A steal... ;)
Very impressed by the selection . . .
Although there are no free modern books (that I've seen, at least), the selection of classics and non-fiction books is much more than what I'd expected! Very customizable reading experience. The only 3-star aspect of this app is its ease of use. Because it downloads books from several different websites, you have to look through each website's catalogue for the book you're looking for. There is a search feature but it wouldn't work for me. Overall - 5 star app.
Great way to search for books.
Stanza searches multiple Web sites for e-books and is highly useful for downloading and reading books. It could be more useful in providing reviews for multiple titles of books (for example, which version of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is unabridged, contain notes, etc.?)Otherwise, it's a great alternative to a Kindle. Try it out!
Best eBook reader for the iPhone
Great reader, great content, and all those out of copyright books that cost a buck with other apps are free.
Ad Choices