Hasta La Gadget!

Jun 04

Stanza for iPad Adds Comic-Book Support

Posted in: e-readers, ipad, tablets, Today's Chili

We’d all but given up on Stanza, our favorite iPhone e-reading app ever reaching the iPad. It seemed that Amazon had bought out Stanza only to kill it and reduce competition for its own Kindle for iPad. It turns out we were wrong.

Today, Stanza was updated to version 3.0, and will now work on the iPad. Seasoned Stanza users will be comforted that little has changed in the book-browsing and reading interface: it is still as slick and customizable as ever, and you can still add your favorite third-party book repositories. In fact, in use it really just feels like a big, non-pixelated version of the iPhone app.

But there are some pretty cool new features, too. First is support for comic-books and PDFs. Yes, you can now read any of your CBR, CBZ or DjVu scans in Stanza (on both iPad and iPhone). It isn’t a great comic-book reader, but it gets the job done, and it’s fast. This feature is also why you are reading this post right now instead of my top four iPad comic-book apps, which will now be a top five and appear on Monday.

You can also get files into Stanza via iTunes, just as you can with any other document-based apps. Better is that any e-books you may already have in Stanza can be gotten out and copied to your computer (perhaps for later use with iBooks). At a stroke, this makes our guide on rescuing books from Stanza redundant, although you may still like to use it to clean up your metadata.

Stanza 3.0 also reports itself correctly to the iPad OS, telling it that it is ready to open EPUB files. This lets you open books direct from the web or found elsewhere on the iPad, such as in email attachments or inside Dropbox.

The king is back! It might not be as pretty as iBooks, but in terms of features and flexibility, Stanza thrashes Apple’s offering. Free, available now.

Stanza [iTunes]

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