Expanding My Ebook Library with Stanza

Stanza

I have Stanza on my iPod Touch and for the past few days, I have been expanding my Stanza library. And this experience of building, organizing, and accessing a growing electronic book library is pure bliss for a quasi-bibliophile like me.

For those who haven’t heard about this wonderful, wonderful application for the iPhone/iPod Touch, Stanza is a revolutionary ebook reader that allows users to customize font sizes and colors, background colors, hyphenation, page orientation, line spacing, justification, and even page turn effects. Customizing Stanza for a hassle-free eading experience is so easy, imagine changing your reader’s settings by simply tapping the Settings icon. I have tried experimenting with different fonts, font sizes, and font and background colors and it was fun.

Since Stanza has cover flow, browsing through my ebook library is like browsing through songs in my music library. And adding/editing a cover image is as no-sweat as adding album art. I also love the fact that it allows sorting of books according to author, title, date added, and subject and lets me build collections within my library and create reading lists. It also allows bookmarking and automatically loads the last book I read each time I launch the app. Intuitive, huh?

This app allows users to download ebooks from a built-in online catalog. While not all downloads are free, I can still choose from a vast collection of free ebooks from Project Gutenberg, Feedbooks, Munseys, Harlequin, and Random House Free Library. I have downloaded a number of classics and collections for free– complete with book covers!

Furthermore, since I have an existing collection of ebooks in my laptop, I can share them with my iPod Touch library using a free application called Stanza Desktop. However, I need to have wireless connection to enable sharing but once the ebooks are in my iPod Touch Stanza library, I can access them wirelessly 24/7.

Stanza Desktop supports most file formats and allows users to export ebooks to a range of formats. Most of my ebooks are in PDF format so what I do is export them to eReader format before adding them to my Stanza library. Stanza supports PDF but I prefer the “look and feel” of ereader.

I now have 28 book titles in my Stanza library and although I can add dozens more, I have decided to take it slow lest I be overhelmed. I will be adding more books by Jude Deveraux, Julie Garwood, and Johanna Lindsey but in the meantime, it will be a collection of Nancy Drew Mystery Stories for me.