Seavista Software Blog : Internet Developer Ramblings

 Want to read E-books on your shiny new iPhone?  Wired takes a look at popular software for reading e-books and more.

 

The free app Stanza is a favorite e-book reader of many an iPhone owner. You can also use it to search and download thousands of free books.

 

 

 

Here’s a roundup of the best e-book reader software for the iPhone:

Stanza (App Store link)
Far and away the nicest e-book reader for the iPhone, Stanza also happens to be free. Once you install Stanza and download some books (Stanza offers a large library of downloadable books, see below for more sources) reading is just a matter of flicking your fingers down the page.

Stanza also offers the ability to import your own e-books into using a free computer-based app from LexCycle (available for both Windows and Mac). It’s currently a beta, but worked well in our testing. E-books you create are then available for download on your iPhone (or iPod Touch) and computer.

eReader (App Store link)
An iPhone version of the e-book reader popular on the Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian platforms, eReader isn’t quite a iPhone-esque as Stanza but it’s still a capable app. And eReader has done a good job of porting to the iPhone, embracing the platform norms like accelerometer support for reading orientation and gestures for page-turning. Another very nice feature in eReader is the ability to look up words in a built-in dictionary app.

EReader is primarily tied to two online book services — eReader.com and Fictionwise.com — where you can buy and download texts. Sadly there’s no way to purchase directly from the iPhone app, but the website does have an iPhone-optimized version to make purchasing a bit easier.

But despite some nice features eReader was a bit buggy in our testing, crashing repeatedly. EReader is a free download.

BookShelf (App Store link)
Another very nice option, BookShelf will set you back $10 but offers some nice extras not found in the others, like different color schemes (black on white, green on black and more), customizable fonts and more.

Other great features include custom bookmarks and the ability to make your book collection publicly available. The latter feature requires a desktop app which itself requires a recent version of Java

The free app Stanza is a favorite e-book reader of many an iPhone owner. You can also use it to search and download thousands of free books.