Saturday, October 04, 2008

Social sharing e-books through Stanza


Stanza is a free iPhone "e-reader" app that has been downloaded more than 395,000 times, greater than a recent Citigroup estimate of 380,000 Kindles that it predicts Amazon will sell in 2008.

The most exciting thing about Stanza is that you can also download the free Stanza Desktop, create your own digital books in the eBook format, and post them on line to be automatically opened and downloaded by using the "epub" protocol. They can be either posted on a web server, or shared from your own computer, much like iTune's ability to share your library with other iTunes users. A difference is that in this case you can actually download the e-books from a shared library.

Stanza does plan to charge $15 for each single-user license when it comes out of beta, but academic discounts are planned.

All we need now is an iPod with a larger screen, that 3.5" monitor is still a bit too small for me for any extensive reading.