A Guaranteed Bestseller.

• Category: Entertainment
• Developer: Lexcycle
• Version: 1.2
• Cost: Free
• For: iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPod Touch
• Download URL

With all the media options available – iTunes music, Youtube videos, podcasts, and the Internet – the iPhone is the ultimate portable media center. However, it took me no more than a day since picking up my iPhone to realize that it was perfect for one more type of media – books. With its large display and touch-screen capability, the iPhone seemed a natural fit for reading ebooks; and after a quick search on the app store, I found that it was.

There is no shortage of e-book readers on the iTunes App Store, but in terms of complete package, one stands alone: Stanza. This app is as close to perfect as they come. Stanza starts with a fairly standard interface: a menu where you can navigate the downloaded books by title, author, or subject. Click on a downloaded book, and Stanza loads the text in about 3 seconds, continuing where you left off.

Controls within Stanza is intuitive and easy to use. Pages can be turned simply by tapping on the left or right edge of the phone, or my favorite way of swiping left and right (just like turning a book). Tap on the middle of the screen brings up a menu allowing you to navigate to chapters or go back to the main menu.

All of these features described – which I really like – just makes Stanza a good ebook reader. What makes Stanza truly excellent is the features that it has in addition to the reading function. First off, Stanza comes with an incredible array of options to customize the app. Stanza allows you to customize pretty much everything. Starting from Stanza’s appearance, you can control the font type, size and color, line spacing, margin width, and background. Then you can control how Stanza works: what left and right tap does, auto-hide menu, auto-load last book, auto-dim, auto-rotation lock, etc. The level of customization is amazing; allowing you to shape the reading experience to the way you like it.

Furthermore, Stanza also makes available a desktop app (available for Apple computers; a beta version of Stanza for Windows users was also recently released). The desktop app allows you to load ebooks in pretty much every format out there – from the new ePub format to e-Reader format to your standard html, word docs, and .rtfs. Once loaded, you can turn on the “share” feature and load the books onto your iPhone. For me, this made Stanza an instant library. I have close to a hundred books that I had on my old Palm Pilot, which were gathering e-dust. Stanza’s app made all of these books available again, and I’ve been happily re-reading books ever since.

Conclusion

With its intuitive controls, excellent array of customizable features, and support for a large number of formats through its desktop app, Stanza is a clear winner. Stanza’s on the first page of my home page and its going to be there to stay.

App Score: 5.0 out of 5.

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