Stanza for the iPhone is an ebook reader that is free and highly customizable. You have the ability to upload your own ebooks in a number of different formats, and they all work seamlessly with the reader. You also have the ability to download a number of titles directly from the web to the iPhone, and while the recent releases don’t tend to be free, the selection of free books is still quite vast and diverse (you can even find 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and other Jules Verne novels for free). Here is a video review of the application:
My one comment about the reader is that uploading books from the computer is still quite cumbersome: you have to download the Stanza software from Lexcycle, enable sharing, and then fiddle with firewalls and other options so that the iPhone will be able to recognize the computer you are using. Hopefully that process will be streamlined in the future. In the meantime, there are many, many options for books to download directly from the iPhone, and now for a limited time Random House is offering 9 books for free, including Prague by Arthur Phillips, The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst, and Whiskey Rebels by David Liss (I would search for these titles in the Stanza application in the iPhone instead of taking the extra step and downloading them to your computer).
All in all, I still find reading books on the iPhone a bit awkward, but in my opinion it beats carrying around a heavy book or a Kindle (it’s large enough that you might as well have the book… plus it does nothing else but display books in black and white). Stanza is perfect for the train, or for impromtu moments when you have to wait around for something.
