Comments on: Battle of the e-Book readers: Stanza vs. iBooks

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 02:17:02 +0000

Long time fan of Stanza. Flirted with Kindle app a bit and was most excited to see iBooks on my iPhone. Sadly, I have to agree that it needs to add a few more of Stanzas tricks at least for the iPhone crowd that has to deal with smaller screens. One app that never gets mentioned is Eucalyptus. For project gutenburg text there is no better app. It’s full justification is akin to what one can obtain with the likes of latex. Absolute joy. At a cost. $9.99. Which a lot of people pale at seeing, but I’m serious, it’s awesome for gutenburg.

By: CM Harrington

CM Harrington — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 18:01:48 +0000

I’m surprised no one has mentioned that the Stanza version doesn’t seem to do italics (notice the word “the” in the Stanza app is all-caps, but the iBooks version is in proper italics.

By: David Boni

David Boni — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 05:36:48 +0000

I should mention that Stanza also lets you control the leading (or line height) of your text as well. There really is no contest here.

By: João Carlos de Pinho

João Carlos de Pinho — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:02:00 +0000

I completely agree with the article: full justification is a poor alignment choice for onscreen reading. By the way, the lack of typographical controls like text alignment and line height is the main reason I didn’t buy a Kindle yet.

Regarding iBooks, did anyone notice, in Steve Jobs keynote at WWDC, that the text in the iPod version of ‘Winnie the Pooh’ is left aligned? To me, this means that either there will be alignment controls in the iPod’s iBooks (maybe in the iPad’s too) or Steve was showing a custom version of the book.

@Niels: As the article states, that’s the difference: the iBooks version is better to look at; the Stanza version is better to read. Left aligned text has even spacing between words, which helps to read faster and in a more enjoyable way; the uneven spacing between words in justified text makes reading slower and fatiguing (even annoying and utterly ugly, when this alignment is used in narrow blocks of text, like in the iPhone screen). Concerning the line height, the Stanza sample is indeed tighter, but the application allows fine adjustments of
this (and many other) typographical features.

By: David Boni

David Boni — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 10:46:59 +0000

I’ve been suggesting Stanza for a long time now. You can change the color, too—I prefer green text on black for some late-night Matrix-esque reading sessions.

I still stick to my ultimate opinion, though: buying an iPad is a foolish waste.

By: Niels Matthijs

Niels Matthijs — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:12:15 +0000

I’m a bit surprised by the conclusion of this article. The first screenshot looks like a blob of text thrown together (looking in fact much like a regular blog articl) while the second actually feels like reading a book. At least to me it’s much easier to read could also be due to a line-height that lets the text breath more).

Can’t image many “regular” (read non-design/non-typophyle) people actually favoring the first application.

By: Chris Prather

Chris Prather — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:31:11 +0000

I thought the problem with full justification was that iBooks and the Kindle Reader don’t properly hyphenate, or even make an attempt, and thus end up with poor spacing and horrible rivers in lines of text.

As Liz Castro points out, Stanza on the iPad at least has a hyphenation library and attempts to build some hyphenation into it’s full justification. That combined with the wider range of font choices (including Hoefler Text which I find more than legible on the iPad) really help to make it much improved *even* in a fully justified layout.

By: Richard Fink

Richard Fink — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 23:57:47 +0000

Ultimately browsers will do double duty as both a “browser” and an e-reader. I’m with Joe Clark on this: leveraging HTML/CSS/JavaScript for ebooks is a no-brainer.
To me, the idea of an e-book disconnected from the network, makes no sense. Seems retrograde.
I want to annotate, bookmark. I want to share. I want to copy passages into other docs. And more.
Doing nothing but porting a printed book onscreen leaves me cold.
It’s like something out of the eighties. And very, very strange that we can’t seem to do it right!
RE: iBooks – the formatting problems have gotten a lot of bad press. Apple has to know it sucks. Expect changes.

By: zeldman

zeldman — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 23:37:47 +0000

It is quite possible to design beautiful looking books for iBooks.

Indeed it is! But if a book hasn’t been designed—if it’s merely been ported to e-pub from text, as is the case with the vast literary riches of Project Gutenberg, for example—then you are stuck with full justification in iBooks. (But not in Stanza.)

By: Liz Castro

Liz Castro — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 18:47:59 +0000

P.S. What I find even more interesting is Stanza’s use of hyphenation libraries (are they built into the iPad??). iBooks, as far as I can tell, ignores them completely, and at the very least, doesn’t let you choose the desired one, as Stanza does.

By: Liz Castro

Liz Castro — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 18:44:22 +0000

Although it is indeed interesting that Stanza offers a number of reader overrides, including justification, line-height, margins, and paragraph indent, it seems misleading to say that “In iBooks, one cannot turn off full justification”. Indeed, a book designer can design an ePub with left alignment, and it stays left-aligned when viewed with iBooks.

It is quite possible to design beautiful looking books for iBooks. I will be publishing a book with instructions for such an endeavor shortly, titled, “ePub: Straight to the Point” and have published a number of articles on that subject already on my blog.

Hope that’s helpful.

Liz

By: Matt Wiebe

Matt Wiebe — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 16:54:35 +0000

Probably my favorite Stanza feature is the ability to use Hoefler Text to read on the iPad. iBooks inexplicably left it out.

I remain optimistic about Stanza’s future, given that the iPad update was released at all. Hopefully Amazon is just trying to own both their proprietary Kindle distribution platform and the major open epub alternative, hedging their bets rather than merely closing down the competition.

By: Davide

Davide — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 14:06:45 +0000

I hate read eBook on iPad/iPhone (but i love iPad and iPhone ;-) ). I use Cybook Gen3 and my eyes are happy.

By: hand_coding

hand_coding — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 13:14:32 +0000

My favourite feature in Stanza is the way you can adjust the brightness by swapping one finger up and down.
A big drawback: scrolling is such a no-no that it shamelessy spreads pictures across multiple pages if it doesn’t fit (landscape mode).

By: shigzeo

shigzeo — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 13:05:01 +0000

I have to agree with the pith above. Stanza is simply slick – for reading. iBooks looks and feels like a mimic, but without any real purpose other than the lure potential customers with an idea. I am into licensing books since most of my reading nowadays is done on my iPod touch, but iBooks isn’t the way I’d choose to do it for now – at least not without the promise of massive changes on the horizon.