Hasta La Gadget!

Stanza, our favorite iPhone e-reader application, has not yet been updated for the iPad. Maybe it’s coming soon and will be awesome, or maybe the current owner, Amazon, has killed it to reduce competition for its money-making Kindle app.

Either way, unless you want to read your e-book collection on a blocky, pixel-doubled screen, you’ll have to switch readers.

But what about all the books you already have in your Stanza library? Here we show you how to extract you books from Stanza, pretty them up and put them into iBooks on your iPad.

Getting books into Stanza is easy. You can beam them across your Wi-Fi network using the companion desktop application or with the clunky but powerful e-book manager Calibre. You can buy them from within the application itself, or you can add online repositories of varying legitimacy.

Once the books are on there, though, they’re stuck. You can jailbreak your iPhone and go fishing around in the file system, looking for the books. Or you can download a Java app that will churn through the iPhone backups on your computer and sift out the books within.

Download the app, called “Stanza Book Restore Tool”, from Lexcycle, the developers of Stanza. Point it at your backup folder (on the Mac you’ll find it in Users/yourname/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup), choose a destination and hit “Recover Books”. All the books will be copied to your computer.

But what then? Now you have a bunch of EPUB files littering your desktop. You could drag them straight into iTunes, where they’ll be imported into your book collection, but the lovely cover artwork you enjoyed in Stanza will be gone, replaced by text on a generic, plain book cover. What you need is the aforementioned Calibre, previously seen on Gadget Lab in the service of adding Instapaper and other newspapers to your Kindle.

Download the free Calibre app for Mac or Windows, drag in the EPUB files and then go to work. Your books’ title and author data should be cleanly filled out already, but if you right-click on a book (or hit the e key) you can edit the metadata. The easiest way is to let Calibre pull the info down from the internet.

Once this is done, click the “Download cover” button to do just that. Calibre gets it right 99 percent of the time. If you don’t like the cover, you can add your own from an image file.

The next step is essential if you want to import all the new keywords and cover art along with the books into iTunes. You need to convert the books to EPUB.

But wait. They’re already EPUB files, right? Yes, but right now the newly added metadata isn’t baked into the files. Running an export won’t create new files, but it will replace the old one with the newly enriched versions.

Do this as a bulk action and go make a coffee. If you’re using a Mac, don’t get too scared when its fans start to spin like a leaf-blower.

Next, you need to separate out all the EPUB files and just drag them into iTunes. The problem is that they’re stuck inside subfolders. On a Mac, the best way is to run a spotlight search on the Calibre catalog folder, choosing “file extension=epub” as your search term. Drag those files onto the iTunes icon and wait.

Once the import is done, you’ll see a beautiful library of e=books ready to sync to iBooks on the iPad.

Restoring Stanza books from iTunes backup [Lexcycle]

Calibre [Calibre-ebook]

Stanza [Lexcycle]

See Also:

• Stanza v2.0: The iPhone's Best E-Reader Just Got Better
• IPhone Stanza Downloads May Top Kindle Sales
• Gadget Lab Guide: How to Un-Cripple Your International Kindle
• iBooks Store Loaded with Project Gutenberg Titles at Launch
• Apple's Tablet E-Book App Rips off Indie Dev's Creation

Rejoice, oh Android lovers. Thy OS of choice has finally graduated to the point where its latest variant is also the most used — a statistic that is likely to last for only a day given Google’s intent to reveal Android 2.2, or Froyo, at its I/O conference tomorrow. For the first time since El Goog’s been keeping these platform version stats, 2.1 has risen above 1.5, the previous incumbent, having grown from 32.4 percent on May 3 (chart after the break) to 37.2 percent on May 17. This rapid ascension can only be expected to accelerate with more devices getting their Eclair permissions slips, and let’s not forget that Google will be trying its hardest with 2.2 to make upgrades easier for phone makers to implement. Onwards and upwards we go.

[Thanks, Chris D]

Continue reading Android 2.1 becomes most used version, just in time to be obviated by Froyo

Android 2.1 becomes most used version, just in time to be obviated by Froyo originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 May 2010 06:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You don’t hear a lot about exciting baby trends in Japan (other than crying baby videos and iPhone apps), no doubt due to its declining birth rate.

It’s full marks to Rezon, then, for this new innovation: a very stylish stamp that you can customize with your child’s hand or footprint. Called the Otete & Anyo (おててとあんよ) (cute Japanese words for a baby’s hands and feet), it is designed to be a special gift that your infant will cherish until they are much older. It even comes in a collectible wooden box, with the name and birth date of the subject engraved on the stamp.

Of course, getting this stamp made is not like popping into your local convenience store. You first need to make a print of your child’s hand or foot with ink. Then you scan this and send it in, and Rezon get to work making a unique stamp. It’s a bit of a process but we think the results are impressive.

In Japan it has also become customarily for some young parents to make commemorative calligraphy brushes (筆, fude) using the locks of their infant’s hair. Writing with your own hair might seem a bit strange but we presume the final brush is meant to be mostly decorative. Some of these gift sets also include hand prints. For examples, see AkachanFude.co.jp.

You can get the Otete & Anyo stamp from the JapanTrendShop.

Kindle continues its mission to let you read your Amazon-bought e-books anywhere. Amazon has announced the forthcoming Kindle for Android, and it is almost exactly the same as other software-only implementations, like those on the iPhone or Blackberry.

Almost. The big difference here is that you can buy books from within the application (this also works on Blackberry). On the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, you are redirected to the Kindle web site as soon as you choose to buy a new book. On Android phones, you can browse and purchase books from within the Kindle app. This is likely because Amazon doesn’t want to give Apple 30% of each and every transaction, the usual cut taken for in-app transactions.

The Kindle for Android app is “coming soon” and will run on any Android device (v1.6 or newer) that has an SD card installed.

Kindle for Android [Amazon via ★]

See Also:

• Kindle
• Amazon Shows Off Kindle for iPad
• First Look: Kindle for Mac
• Tablet Wars: Amazon Adds Apps to Kindle
• Amazon Brings Kindle to iPhone
• Slack-Off in Meetings With Kindle for Blackberry
• Kindle for PC Ships, Hints at Future Color Kindle

Visa has announced a contactless payment system for the iPhone which allows you to use the phone as a credit card. It works using RFID tech, and is as kludgy as hell.

Called In2Pay, the payment method uses a modified microSD card with a near-field communications (NFC) chip inside. Because the iPhone doesn’t yet sport a microSD slot, the card sits in a case which powers the chip and allows contactless payments, just like those used to pay for toll booths or public transport. You would be able to hold your iPhone up to a compatible reader and make a transaction. It would work even if there were no clerk present, for instance at a vending machine.

The idea of schemes like In2Pay is to free you from carrying a wallet, allowing you to do everything with your cellphone. But this implementation, which requires carrying a cellphone case, is not much different from just taping your credit card to the back of your phone. (Or slipping it into a credit card-holding iPhone cover.)

It also requires a compatible card reader. What, the neighborhood restaurant doesn’t accept contactless payments? Sorry, there are only 100,000 merchants in the U.S. that have NFC payment readers, compared to millions that accept old-style credit cards.

However, it does come direct from Visa, lending a certain weight to the scheme, and when more phones accept the microSD it will be essentially invisible. Add to that the fact that iPhone users tend to be more disposed to trying out new tech and you can easily see that this is a pilot scheme from Visa designed to grow the infrastructure of contactless payments, which have so far failed to meet Visa’s inflated expectations.

In2Pay joins several methods for receiving credit card payments, including Square, a little white cube that slots into the iPhone’s headphone jack and allows you to swipe regular old credit cards. Soon, it seems clear, almost all payments will be made using cellphones, even the ones that involve paying your friend back that dollar he owes you. Just don’t lose that phone.

DeviceFidelity Announces Mobile Contactless Payment Solution for iPhone [Visa via MobileCrunch]

See Also:

• PayPal Fist Bumps Square
• Square Mobile Credit Card System (Beta)
• Swipe Credit Cards With Your iPhone