Kindle App v. Stanza: Round 1!
I’ve been reading ebooks with Stanza on my iPhone since early January. I had never honestly entertained the idea of reading ebooks, until I hit a huge reading phase and realized that as I’ve gotten older, it’s gotten harder to hang on to hefty hardbacks. After a while, it makes my hands hurt to hang onto a paperback in such a way that I don’t crack the spine, which, as all good readers know, eventually causes the pages of the book to fall out.
For eons, Stanza has been the de facto standard for e book reading on the iPhone, and I was very happy with how it worked. Text colors and font sizes were completely customizable to make reading easier on the eyes. Tapping to either side of the screen advanced pages forward or backwards. Accessing the menu was done through a simple tap in the center of the screen. There was also the advantage of having direct download access to the entire width and breadth of the Gutenberg project without having to sign into an account. Stanza is just incredibly intuitive to iPhone users. It works like an iPhone user expects an iPhone app to work. So pitting yourself up against something that just plain works is a pretty brave thing to do.

