Clive

Upgrading to iOS 5 on my iPhone 4 broke one of my favourite apps, Stanza, an ebook reader. A quick search on the internet will show you how many people are upset by this. I have used my PDAs/smartphones to read books for years, starting with a Psion Series 3a device and books I got on CDs at computer fairs and from BBSs. So I was keen to get another ereader and fast. (See my original post here.)

Well I tried ShuBook – it is OK, but there were two problems. I really could not get on trying to ignore all the Chinese characters and although I could connect it to my Calibre library, it would not download the catalogue to the iPhone. I could transfer books to it via iTunes and it was a good reader.

Whilst looking on the web to see what was to become of Stanza I found this page

iOS 5 issues..

which led me onto trying (buying) MegaReader and using it this week and it is working out fine.

Things it does

• It has built in access to online book collections, and I was easily able to add Munseys to the list. So I have access to a huge supply of pulp sci-fi and other freely available books.
• It linked to Calibre and allowed me to access my catalogue across both my office and home networks.
• It gives a good reading experience, including the option to lock the orientation of the page.
• The app is supported by the developer.

There are a few issues (if I use Stanza as the bench mark).

• There is a bug when turning the screen if the orientation is locked, where it does not redraw correctly.
• Stanza had a great feature where the brightness of the screen could be adjusted by drawing a finger up or down the screen – very useful to set a comfortable reading light depending on the ambient light.
• I could only download books one at a time from my Calibre library – in Stanza I could choose to download everything by an author, or from a series or tagged collection with one click.
• The library display can sort the list by author or title, but if you have many books on your iPhone this is a long list to look through – better if you could choose to list all the authors and then drill down to look at their books or show A to Z of the titles and then drill down into those.

Octagon Technology has a client who we support, with manuals he distributes to staff on their iPhones. For this week they have been using iBooks but if MegaReader works out for me I may recommend he buys this for his staff.

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Here are a couple of pages with links to free ebooks.

FREE eBooks, Excerpts, Stories! « Mike Cane 2008.

Over 900 Free ePub eBooks! « Mike Cane 2008.