While all those features are great, Stanza also includes a few frustrations. (Without hyphenation, it’s necessary to employ ridiculous word spacing, depending on the words in a given line, to keep the right side flush.) To date, Stanza is the only iOS e-reading app that I’ll enable full justification on, because the app supports automatic hyphenation. You can also control text justifications, line spacing, paragraph spacing, indent width, and margins. And in a particularly clever touch, swiping up and down on the screen adjusts the screen’s brightness. Stanza even lets you set a background image, but I can’t imagine most sane readers would go that route. I tweaked both defaults-switching to a sepia-toned background for daytime reading, and dark gray on black for night. Stanza offers numerous reading themes, all of which you can further customize, saving settings for daytime and nighttime reading. You can also adjust not just font size, but also font and background colors. The app sports impressive display controls: You can choose from more than 40 fonts (although, admittedly, you’ll likely never want to read a book in Marker Felt or some of the other more whimsical fonts offered). Where Stanza bests its competitors is in its customizations. I do find it annoying that, even when afforded all the screen real estate that the iPad provides, Stanza doesn’t show book prices in most views when you shop-you need to tap into the individual book itself to find out how much it costs.īook-Mobile: Stanza doesn’t have the dedicated e-bookstores that iBooks and Kindle offer, but it does let you read free books from a number of sources.

It’s a far cry from the far more robust Kindle bookstore (with 600,000 titles), or even Apple’s iBookstore (with “tens of thousands” of titles)-but if you can find books that you want to read, that’s all that matters.

That means you can’t read iBookstore purchases or Kindle store books in Stanza, but you can read free books from Project Gutenberg, the Random House Free Library, and buy books within the app from Fictionwise, BooksOnBoard, and O’Reilly, among others. The app connects to a variety of online sources for free and paid books, and can read other books in non-DRM-protected ePub, eReader, PDF, Comic Book Archive, and DjVu formats. The most obvious difference is Stanza’s lack of integration with its own dedicated e-book store. But Stanza’s feature set differs notably from Amazon’s Kindle app. Lexcycle, in turn, has been bought by Amazon since our first review of the then iPhone-only Stanza appeared. Stanza, now a universal app for the iPhone and iPad alike, is an e-reader from Lexcycle.

Free ereader app for iphone