As the weather has been a bit grey here in Dingwall this morning I have been reading on my iPhone using Stanza – and I finished the eBook I was reading. I am not sure how many books I have loaded on my phone on Stanza, it must be a couple of hundred – but rather than choose one of these I decided to see what was available online for free that I could access and use on my iPhone.

Project Gutenberg and iBooks

Everyone’s first stop for free ebooks, Project Gutenberg now has a mobile site Project Gutenberg Mobile, which works well in Safari on my iPhone 4 and is easy to use and find books that you would be interested in. I looked in the Science Fiction section and found The Door Through Space, by Marion Zimmer Bradley – it was easy to find the download for this book, I chose an ePub version and opened it in iBooks, Apple’s own eBook reader available from the App Store for free. I also chose the version with images so I had the book cover showing on my iBooks shelf!

It was a very easy process and with over 36,000 books available you should be able to find something that interests you.

Stanza

The Stanza app has a built in online catalogue.

Within this catalogue are books to purchase – but there are many free books including a link to Project Gutenberg. Some of the free books on offer, from the shops, are the first books in a series so encouraging you to go back and buy subsequent episodes. Project Gutenberg was easy to use; with the books going straight into your Stanza library.

I was interested in Books from Munseys as they advertise pulp fiction – my favourite – I like nothing better than a old fashioned sci-fi pulp story, with heroes, heroines, monsters and laser beams!

I quickly found a book I was interested in their catalogue by going to the Genres Section. Who could resist this cover? (JSC has just commented “don’t judge a book by the cover”, teenagers, they of course know everything!)

Clicking the download button puts the book directly into your Stanza library. If your return to this page later the download button becomes a read now button as the app records you have a copy of this book in your library.

A quick browse of Munsys and Project Gutenberg shows you there are thousands of free books out there to choose from.

If you want to purchase the latest best seller then Stanza and iBooks both give you access to those as well.

I have an account with Smashwords – I have bought the Starship Sofa short story collections from them. For these books they offered them in a variety of formats – I chose ePub for Stanza/iBooks – all the formats were DRM free.

This article is sponsored by Octagon Technology Lincoln, England