Update: The beta period has now ended. Thank you to all the users who signed up and provided valuable feedback!

We are pleased to announce a limited beta testing phase for purchasing books from within Stanza. This feature allows users to browse and search from a large selection of bestsellers and other contemporary books, purchase them, and then download them to your device, all without leaving Stanza iPhone/iPod. Please only sign up if you think you may want to purchase an electronic book from within Stanza.

For those interested in signing up as a beta user for this feature, please send an e-mail to "beta@lexcycle.com", and include your iPhone or iPod Touch's unique identifier ("UUID") in the subject link of the e-mail, along with your first name. To get your iPhone's or iPod's UUID, plug the device into your computer and wait until iTunes recognizes it. Select your phone from the Devices list in iTunes and click the "Summary" tab. To see your UUID, click on the word "serial number" beside the picture of the iPhone. You should then see the word "identifier" and a long alphanumeric string – this is your UUID. To copy it, just press command + C on your Mac's keyboard (or control + C in Windows).

For example, your e-mail's subject line might look like:

"Sarah Jones: b201ede0172ed4677c4e61cdf85216d0cd1f7c"

For those users who sign up, you will be sent an e-mail in the following days with further instructions for how to access the purchase features. Discussions about the beta program will take place on the private mailing list; please do not post questions or comments about it on this public forum.

Acceptance to the beta program is on a first-come-first serve basis, so sign up today!