Ebooks iphone

Promptly, though, a unpaid allegory of the Mac ebook enumeration software, Stanza, has found its system into the store, and it rocks. Here’s a hasty synopsis of how it works, and lawful how to turn your iPhone into a mini - Start.

Lead off, head to the App Store and grab the complimentary download of Stanza. It comes go underground one book: H. G. Wells’ The Week Engine ( whole worth rendering if you haven’t even now ). Using the application is seeing no trouble whereas you’d credit. At left you see the library page. Here you pick your book, listed by author or title. Click on one and the text slides across to fill the screen. Font size is controllable while you are reading, but to change fonts and colors you need to visit the iPhone’s central settings section.

To turn a page, you either swipe with a finger, or just touch the edges of the screen to page back and forth. You can also jump to a particular chapter by tapping the screen once to bring up the inline options. Stanza will also remember your place automatically. Even if you switch to another book in the meantime, the bookmarks are still in place when you come back. If you want to find a specific passage, you can search on words or phrases. Right now this doesn’t extend to the whole book — you can only search in the current chapter, but given this limit it works fine.

So the reading part is easy, but how do you get more books onto the iPhone? This is probably the most exciting part of the package. Sure, you can beam books wirelessly from a Mac or PC using the desktop version of Stanza, and that is very useful for adding your own texts. But the iPhone application does something that only the Kindle has done until now: It lets you download books over the air.





Here you see the online " store ". The inverted commas are in there because everything is free. Stanza hooks up to website Feedbooks, which offers public domain and Creative Commons texts to download for nothing. The entire catalog can be searched from the iPhone and texts directly downloaded — no computer required. And because these are tiny text files, the downloads are almost instant.

I really like this application. It means you can quite literally carry a small library in your pocket. The one problem is that, unlike the Kindle, you can’t buy new titles direct from the iPhone. Stanza supports most e - book formats, so if you buy a. mobi book, for example, you’ll be able to read it. But imagine if you could browse Amazon and buy things directly. It might kill the Kindle, but Amazon would sell a lot of e - books.

Sadly, it’s unlikely to happen, as Amazon seems committed to selling Kindles ( touting the device continually since its launch ) and Apple, with its own content store, has little incentive to work with Amazon.

Still, the troubles with the Kindle are manifold: It’s expensive, you can only buy it in the United States, and it is bulky. With around six million iPhone owners out there already, plus an unknown number of iPod Touch users, the potential market for e - books is huge. This really could be the tipping point when electronic books go mainstream.