I’ve been reading on iPhone since quite a while... mostly I have been using Discover which is a fairly simple free app (fed by advertisement). (sorry, only an iTunes store link is available, their URL is always empty!). However, similarly to most document storages, Discover does not remember correctly where you were reading (nor which file you were reading!).

Then a friend told me about Calibre, wanting to give me an ePub document he was reading on his Android. So I installed that on my Mac, then on my iPhone, well... Stanza, which used to be a fairly primitive book-reader last I looked. Well, it’s not primitive at all anymore!

I’ve always been focussed on reading PDFs because this is what you get as E-Book format generally. It’s often at the limit of readability and it’s slow at displaying on iPhone. Be it on Discover, Safari, or anywhere else. For HTML, I have the offline mode of iCab. Well, Stanza took me away of that with that ePub.

Browsing the ePub of Stanza was just a joy: quality display, easy to browse pages, click long and you can copy fragments, look-up in dictionary, and annotate. Hey I almost managed to convince my wife of E-book-reading because I could download all the works of one her favorite authors all from the Stanza iPhone app! Who said the iPhone screen is too small? No way!

I hope that one this will even allow mathematical formulæ... specialists are on track for this and probably MathML-for-Safari will help it. but in the meantime, just normal books...

Two things left bother me:

1. •Lexcycle, the makers of Stanza, call it a revolution in reading. Well, I find the evolution of Stanza is not revlutionary, it’s just right as one would naturally wish it.
   

2. •How to click on link? I haven’t managed yet. Shame on me.