I don’t need a Kindle but a battery pack for my iPod touch. At least that’s what I’m telling myself after I’ve discovered Lexcycle’s app Stanza (update 2022-01-20: defunct) for me. After I finished the last bunch of books I had ordered from Amazon I was kind of too lazy to order new ones. Too lazy and I couldn’t find any Star Trek book I was really looking forward to that I didn’t have at that time. Plus, I had just spent nearly 100 EUR with Amazon for the whole DVD collection of Charmed ;-)
Then I remembered that public domain books like the works by H.G. Wells et al. were still on my to-read list. So I started looking for a free ebook reader for the touch (which I’ve been using more and more to read stuff like online manuals etc.) and after just a few minutes stumbled upon “Stanza”.
Besides being a free application, Stanza is also actually quite a comfortable reader. The zoom level is just right, you flip pages by stroking the display in the respective direction, it hides any interface elements from you while reading and it gives you direct access to a handful of sources for free ebooks, either free as in beer, under Creative Commons licenses or the public domain. (I don’t know if there are also some commercial stores integrated into Stanza yet, though.)
So far I’ve only read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine but the experience was really pleasant (considering that I normally prefer reading novels in the dead-paper format over anything else) and from what I’ve seen of it I can really recommend Stanza :D
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Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂