They make you turn your iPod off on take-off and landing, leaving you with about 30-40 minutes of the flight where you cannot read. The only drawback to relying on the iPod to read books I ran into was when flying. I find it much more convenient than carrying around a paperback. Since I usually have my iPod with me, Stanza has been great for trips to the doctor or dentist. When returning to Stanza, it automatically loads the book I was reading at the page where I left off. When I run into a word I don’t know, I exit Stanza and open WeDict to look it up. Fortunately, there is an option in the configuration to lock the screen rotation in standard or wide, depending on how you open the book. This feature was not a big plus for me, because the screen would rotate when I read while lying on my side. The display supports screen rotation, so you can rotate your iPod horizontally and read in wide-screen. Most of the time, I navigate using the same hand that is holding the iPod.

I would have also liked the ability to jump entire chapters. The middle zone opens the navigation bars where you can use the slider to move to any page in the current chapter, or return to the main menu. There is also an option for darkening the background or inverting the color scheme to reduce eye strain.įor navigation, Stanza provides three tap zones. You can also turn off the iPod status bar for an extra line of text. The display font is configurable, so you can make the font larger or smaller to suit your preference. This conversion was a bit primitive when I tried it, but is sure to improve as the product matures. They also have an OS X and Windows version of Stanza that can convert PDFs to ePub format books, the standard book format supported by Stanza. The main menu offers links to downloading public domain books directly to your iPod/iPhone. Stanza keeps track of your last page in all the books you are reading, so switching between books is easy. I have been rereading 1984 for myself and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for my kids. Stanza is one of the freebies from the iTunes App Store. A few weeks ago, I got around to downloading some books into Stanza on my iPod Touch, and now I consider Stanza a must have App for the iPod Touch or iPhone.

Stanza ebook reader for mac review