Anything! However, Stanza is especially designed for reading large bodies of text where formatting is not an integral part of the reading experience. Since Stanza strips out all graphics, tables, and other formatting items, it is more appropriate for reading novels, stories, essays, and news articles. Graphics-heavy content like textbooks and multimedia web sites will be difficult to read using Stanza.

• Back to Top

There are numerous places to find eBooks on the internet. Note that Stanza does not yet support an books encumbered with Digital Rights Management (DRM).

• Project Gutenberg: Millions of free, public domain books, generally available in text and HTML formats. Includes just about any classic book you can think of from before 1923, and a few more recent books.
• The Internet Archive: The Internet Archive is scanning books in libraries around the world and making them available for free in a range of formats, including searchable PDFs of the original page images. They have about half-a-million texts so far, and counting.
• Baen Free Library: A pioneer in the e-book field, Baen makes selected titles from it’s line of science fiction and fantasy books available for free download. Lots of good stuff for SF fans!
• Free-eBooks.net: A huge directory of free e-books, most of which are self-published. You’ll have to do some digging to find quality stuff here, but there are plenty of good books to be found with some patience.
• Memoware: Memoware includes tens of thousands of public domain books, formatted for a wide range of portable devices. They also have a premium bookstore where more current, mainstream books can be bought.
• Fictionwise: A huge e-book bookstore, specializing in SF, with titles formatted for a range of devices. Check out their always-changing selection of free e-books drawn from their collection. Note that only books in "multiformat" will be readable with Stanza.

• Back to Top

Stanza does not currently support reading books that are encumbered with Digital Rights Management (DRM), which is a technique that publishers use to prevent people from reading books on more than one device. We are actively looking into solutions to this limitation, but for the time being, Stanza is limited to books that do not have any DRM or whose DRM has been removed. An error saying that the book is locked indicates that the book is protected with DRM.

• Back to Top

Stanza contains built-in reading support for Amazon Kindle, Mobipocket, Microsoft LIT, PalmDoc, Microsoft Word, Rich Text Format, HTML, and PDF. More details can be found on Stanza's Supported Formats page.

• Back to Top

Stanza does have the ability to read contemporary content, provided that the electronic book is in a format that Stanza supports, and that the book is not protected with "Digital Rights Management" (DRM). Unfortunately, the majority of contemporary works are protected by DRM, which prevents books from being read on "unauthorized" devices and generally prohibits the copying of the book. Stanza does not yet support any of the major DRM schemes, although we are working with DRM providers to rectify this issue. In the meantime, there are a number of places where contemporary works can be purchased that are not encumbered by DRM:

• Feedbooks (http://feedbooks.com) and Project Gutenberg (http://gutenberg.org) are two examples of free sites where there is a fair amount of modern material.
• Fictionwise (http://fictionwise.com) sells many works of modern fiction in "Multiformat", which means they do not have DRM.
• O'Reilly's Safari Books (http://safari.oreilly.com) collection is an excellent resource for non-DRM technical material.
• Pan Macmillan (http://www.panmacmillan.com) has started selling a number of titles without DRM protection.
• A more comprehensive list of online bookstores can be found at: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_stores

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

Provided your book is a valid ePub file, having a link to it with the "epub://" protocol will cause Stanza to be launched. So if your book is located at "http://somesite.com/books/mybook.epub", you just need to have an additional URL like "epub://somesite.com/books/mybook.epub" to automatically download and import the book into Stanza's library.

• Back to Top

Full instructions for making a catalog that can integrate with the Lexcycle Online Catalog can be found at http://developer.lexcycle.com.

• Back to Top

The native format for Stanza is ePub, which is the Open eBook standard from the International Digital Publishing Forum (http://www.idpf.org/). ePub is supported in Stanza Desktop, iPhone, and iPod Touch, as well as in Adobe Digital Editions and the next generation of e-ink readers like the Sony Reader (PRS-505).

There are a number of ways to create ePub content:

1. Feedbooks (http://feedbooks.com/share/): You can log into Feedbooks and create your own content, which will be made available in ePub, as well as other formats like PDF and Kindle. In addition, any books you create and share will automatically be included in the "Free Books by Feedbooks" section of Stanza's Online Catalog under the "User Created Books" area, so you don't need to download and transfer the book separately.
2. Stanza Desktop (http://stanza.lexcycle.com): Stanza allows you to convert from a large variety of formats like MS LIT, Mobipocket, Kindle, RTF, PDF, MS Word, and many more into ePub
3. Adobe InDesign (http://www.adobe.com/products/indesign/): InDesign is a high-end publishing tool for authors and publishers, and supports the creation of ePub files.
4. Calibre (http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/): a free tool for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux that allows you to convert to ePub from a wide variety of formats. Calibre currently does a better job than Stanza Desktop at preserving styles and formatting of source documents.
5. BookGlutton API (http://www.bookglutton.com/api): If you have your book in HTML format, you can convert it into ePub using their online conversion API

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

Please see http://booksellers.lexcycle.com for full instructions for enabling your users to download books they purchase on your site directly onto their iPhone or iPod Touch.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

We expect the beta period to last at least a couple of months. Stanza's general release will be sometime in the latter half of 2008.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

The beta version enables all of the features that the full retail edition will support. However, beta copies do expire 2 months after they are released. If your copy expires, you will need to download a new beta to continue using Stanza.

• Back to Top

While we plan for Stanza iPhone/iPod Touch to remain free, we may decide to charge a small fee for Stanza Desktop once it completes its beta phase.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

We have concentrated primarily on English for the current release. French, German, and Spanish are known to render correctly, although some features (such as automatic hyphenation) may not work correctly, and may need to be disabled. Japanese and Chinese characters are reported to render correctly, but there are other reported issues with those languages. RTL languages (notably Hebrew and Arabic) do not currently display correctly at all with Stanza. We expect that future releases will improve the language support considerably.

• Back to Top

Yes! Lexcycle intends to offer heavy discounts for academic bulk licenses, as well as licenses for public libraries. You can inquire further by sending e-mail to academic@lexcycle.com.

• Back to Top

Through the Lexcycle Initiative, Stanza will be offered completely free to people with visual or muscular disabilities. For further information, please send e-mail to initiative@lexcycle.com.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

No. You only need to register on the lexcycle.com web site in order to post on our User Forums. Using the Stanza software itself does not require any registration.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

Yes, Stanza is available for both Macintosh and Windows! They can be downloaded from http://download.lexcycle.com

• Back to Top

It is unknown at this time whether Stanza will support Linux. We are still considering the feasibility of supporting the platform. Note that Stanza is supported to have been run successfully on Linux in virtualization environments such as VirtualBox.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

Stanza can export to Amazon Kindle, Mobipocket, PalmDoc, Rich Text Format, HTML, plain text, and others. More details can be found on Stanza's Supported Formats page.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

That is by design. Stanza removes nearly all of the formatting of the text that it reads. This is in order to maximize the flexibility of the user interface, as well as maximize the number of formats we can support. As mentioned above, this makes Stanza unsuitable for content where graphics or formatting is an intrinsic part of the reading experience.

• Back to Top

Some PDFs do not actually contain any text that is readably by a computer, but instead contain a series of pictures of text. You can test to see if this is the case by opening the PDF in a PDF viewer (like Preview.app or Adobe Acrobat), and trying to select the text with the selection tool. If you are unable to highlight any individual letters in the text, then the document is simply a collection of images, and will be unreadable by Stanza.

• Back to Top

Extracting text from PDF is more of an art than a science. This is because PDF doesn't structure its text internally as words and paragraphs, but instead it merely stores individual letters and their coordinates on the page, which makes reconstituting the text from the PDF a challenging task. Stanza does its best to figure out word and paragraph boundaries, but there are frequently problems with the identification. If Stanza badly garbles the rendering of a PDF, you can also try to open the PDF in a PDF viewer (such as Adobe Acrobat or Apple's Preview.app), select all the text (using Edit->Select All), copying the text, and then going back to Stanza and selecting File->New From Clipboard to open the selected text from the clipboard contents.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

Simply open the book in Stanza, plug in your Kindle to your computer using the USB cable that was supplied with the device, select File->Export Book As->Amazon Kindle, then browse to the Kindle on the save file dialog. The Kindle will appear in the dialog with the name you assigned to it when you first registered it.

• Back to Top

Stanza supports exporting books to Mobipocket's format, who makes a free reader for smart phones like the Blackberry, PocketPC, Palm Os, Nokia Series 60, Sony Ericsson UIQ, and others. To get your book onto your phone, simple select File->Export Book As->Mobipocket, then follow the instructions for installing the Mobipocket Reader at www.mobipocket.com.

• Back to Top

Currently, no. The default Kindle format that Stanza exports to does not support non-Latin characters, so texts in non-Latin languages won't display properly on the Kindle. The Kindle does support an additional format (Topaz) that allows for embedding custom fonts. We do intent to support exporting to Topaz in the future, but there is currently no specific timeline for its implementation.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

Unfortunately, Stanza does not yet completely support 64-bit machines, which means if your processor is "Intel Core 2 Duo" or "Xenon" (as seen in the Apple menu's "About This Mac" window), you may have problems running Stanza. 32-bit Macintoshes (such as "Intel Core Duo", "G5", "G4", etc) should have no problems.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

Stanza does not currently support the native Sony Reader format (known as "LRF"). However, a firmware update released at http://esupport.sony.com/ for the Sony Reader PRS505 claims to allow the reading of ePub files, which Stanza does support. The update is not yet available for the PRS500, however.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

This is usually caused by an out-of-date version of Java. Try installing the latest OS 10.4 Java version from http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/macosx_updates/javaformacosx...

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

Stanza iPhone/iPod allows you to edit the title, author, and subjects of your books by tapping the "Edit" button in the library list and making changes to the corresponding text fields. Stanza Desktop, however, does not currently provide any means to change the title or author of a book when exporting it to another format or sharing it with Stanza iPhone/iPod. However, if you can edit the underlying document (such as using a text editor for editing RTF or plain text files), you can provide "hints" to Stanza about the title and author of the book. Specifically, if the first line of the document is of the form: "Title: My Title", then Stanza will guess that the title of the book is "My Title". Similarly, if the second line is "Author: The Author", then Stanza will guess that the author is named "The Author".

In a future release of Stanza Desktop will will allow complete control over the "metadata" of the books by allowing the user to make changes. For the time being, though, the only way to change the information is to either edit the source document in a separate program, or else, if you are sharing the book with Stanza iPhone/iPod, by making the changes via that interface.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

Stanza doesn't currently display any initial opening text; it is a bit like Preview.app or Notepad.exe in that regard. You can open books by selecting the "File"->"Open" menu item.

As Stanza moves along the beta process, we expect to include some initial help text in the screen to guide the user along commonly used tasks. If you have any specific questions on how to use Stanza to load books and transfer them to your iPhone/iPod (which is discussed at http://www.lexcycle.com/faq/how_to_get_books_onto_stanza_iphone), please don't hesitate to let us know.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

This problem is only an issue for the older, "legacy" method for exporting books to the iPhone/iPod using the bookmarklets technique. For more information about the new method, for which this problem is no longer an issue, please see How to get books into Stanza iPhone.

Some large books can slow down the iPhone's browser, and very large ones can even cause it to hang and crash. Symptoms of this will be very slow response to typing in the URL field or opening the bookmarks button. At this time, the only solution is to delete the book from mobile Safari's bookmarks, or else delete them from you Mac's Safari and re-sync the iPhone.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

The dedicated Stanza iPhone application, which can be downloaded onto the iPhone via the Apple App Store, can synchronized with the Stanza Desktop. The Stanza Desktop application is currently available for Apple Macintosh and Windows computers from http://download.lexcycle.com.

When you launch Stanza Desktop, open one or more books that are in any of Stanza's supported formats. You then need to enable sharing by selecting the "Tools" menu, and ensuring that the "Enable Sharing" menu item is checked. Once you have done that, ensure that your iPhone is connected to the same wireless network that your PC is on, and then launch Stanza iPhone. From the top-level library menu, select "Shared Books". You should see your computer name in the menu that appears, which you should then click on. Stanza Desktop will then notify you that your iPhone is attempting to connect to your shared library, and request your permission to allow the connection. Once you have granted permission, Stanza iPhone will display a list of books, one for each window currently open in Stanza Desktop. Clicking on the book with then download it onto your iPhone and import it into your library for later reading.

If you run into problems with sharing, please refer to http://www.lexcycle.com/faq/troubleshooting_sharing for common solutions to issues that users may encounter.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

Stanza iPhone does currently require that your iPhone/iPod Touch be on the same wireless network as your desktop computer. This limitation is due to the inability for any iPhone application to access either the bluetooth networking capabilities of the iPhone or the dock connector. We hope that in the future weeks and months that Apple will allow dedicated programs to access these other means of connecting to desktop computers, but until that happens, being part of the same network is a requirement to transfer books from the desktop to the phone.

If you do not have a wireless network that can be shared between your desktop/laptop and your iPhone/iPod, but you do have a wireless card on your desktop, you can still share books between the devices by using Internet Sharing. You can enable this by opening the System Preferences application, selecting "Sharing", then "Internet Sharing", and then "Airport". Once you have enabled internet sharing on your laptop/desktop, you can then go to your iPhone/iPod's preferences section, enable WiFi, find your computer in the list, and connect to it. Once you have connected, you should be able to share books as described here.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

The iPhone export option in Stanza Desktop (available from File->Export Book As->iPhone Bookmarkets) is a legacy mechanism to get your books on your iPhone, and uses a technique that saves the books as self-contained "bookmarklets", which then need to be imported into Safari and synced with the iPhone. It does not use the dedicated Stanza iPhone reader at all, but instead uses Safari to load and read the books. It suffers from a variety of limitations, such as the inability to remember your last position in the book as well as having stability issues with very large books.

The Stanza iPhone dedicated reader is the next generation of iPhone integration, in that it seamlessly integrates with Stanza Desktop (see how to get books onto Stanza iPhone for more details). You should only need to use the bookmarklets export option if you are unable to connect to your computer over a wireless network, of if you do not have the ability to download and install Stanza iPhone onto your phone or iPod Touch.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

In some cases, you want to lock the book's orientation in place, and not rotate when the iPhone or iPod Touch is turned. You can accomplish this by opening the Stanza Settings (available under the iPhone/iPod "Settings" application), selecting the "Controls & Effects" group, and then enabling the "Lock Book Rotation" option. This will cause the reading window to remain in the orientation that it was in when it was opened from the library or catalog.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

Yes, although you will need to open the port that Stanza uses (9562), as well as ensuring that the firewall allows Bonjour/ZeroConf/Rendezvous access. When in doubt, try disabling your firewall to ensure that sharing without with it disabled, and once you have confirmed that it works, re-enable the firewall and open the necessary ports.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

For most display options, such as font size and face, background and foreground colors, and interline and justification options, you can change those by opening a book, tapping the center of the screen to bring up the toolbars, and then tapping the center gear-shaped icon.

For other settings (such as auto-loading the previous books), Stanza's settings are not in the Stanza application itself, but rather are in the general iPhone/iPod Touch "Settings" area. From your device's Home Screen, tap Settings, then Stanza. From there, you can change the rest of Stanza's preferences.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

To delete a book from Stanza, you must first open the book, tap the center of the screen to bring up the controls, and then tap the icon in the upper-right corner to delete the book. Note that in Stanza 1.0, a "delete" button will appear when swiping across the title of the book in the library list, but this will not actually delete the book from your library.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

Provided the book is in the ePub format (which will typically end with an ".epub" string), you can download a book at a URL by selecting the tools icon from the library view and tapping "Download Book at URL", and then entering the complete URL into the field. Alternately, if a web site has the link to an .epub file in the form of "epub://www.somesite.com/book.epub", then Safari on the iPhone will automatically launch Stanza and download the book.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

If Stanza iPhone 1.3 is displaying a frequent error "Could not parse page data" or "Count not parse page data", and if your device is jailbroken, then the problem may be due to a bug in the XML libraries on the device (as discussed here). If you have Cydia installed on your jailbroken device, updating to the latest version of lib2xml has been reported to fix the problem.

Note that Lexcycle neither recommends nor encourages that you jailbreak your device. This information is merely for those users who have chosen to go down that path.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

Please consider writing a review of Stanza on the Apple App Store by clicking here. Also, if you have a friend with an iPhone or iPod Touch, please spread the word by letting them know about Stanza.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

For formats that don't contain any embedded chapter information (such as plain text, Rich Text Format, and some variants of HTML and PDF), Stanza tries to automatically detect where chapters are. It usually does a good job, but its rules are not perfect, and it can sometimes make bizarre judgements about where a chapter break is. Aside from looking strange and hindering chapter-based navigation, there are no other adverse effects of mis-identified chapters. If you are willing to share the offending text with us by mailing it to support@lexcycle.com, we are always looking for data that will help us improve our chapter identification heuristics.

• Back to Top

If you are experiencing problems with Stanza, either due to it failing to launch, or due to errors or bad behavior during the program running, it is helpful to report any error messages that Stanza might be generating when contacting Lexcycle Support (support@lexcycle.com) or posting on the Lexcycle user forums. This information obtained through the use of the Apple Console.

If you've never used the console log before, launch this application:

/Applications/Utilities/Console.app

It should show the console log in a window titled "console.log". Scroll to the bottom for recent messages.

If you're not sure whether a message is from your app's failure or not, keep the console log open and try launching your app again. If it outputs anything to the console log, you'll see the window contents change.

If there are messages in console.log, copy and paste them into your message, either to support or to the user forum on which you are posting.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

If you are having problems sharing books between Stanza Desktop and Stanza iPhone/iPod, please try these suggestions:

1. If you are on Windows, and when you attempt to enable sharing with the "Tools"->"Enable Sharing" menu you get an error about Bonjour not being installed despite having already installed it, it sometimes helps to open the "Add/Remove Programs" control panel and remove Bonjour completely, then reboot, and then do a fresh install from the file at http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/bonjourforwindows.html.
2. If you are unable to see your PC's name in the "Shared Books" section of Stanza iPhone, and you have enabled sharing in Stanza Desktop without any errors, then you should check to ensure that both the machines are on the same wireless network. You can compare the names of the wireless networks for each device:
   • iPhone/iPod: Launch the "Settings" application and examine the value of the "Wi-Fi Section".
   • Windows: Open the "Control Panel" program and select the "Network" option to see the wireless network name.
   • Macintosh: Open the "System Preferences" application, select "Network", highlight the "AirPort" section of the list, and examine the setting of the "Network Name".
3. If you are not part of an existing wireless network, but your desktop does have a wireless card, you can still share books between your desktop and iPhone/iPod by following these instructions
4. If you are able to see your PC's name from the "Shared Books" menu, but it gives a timeout error after trying to connect, then the problem may be one of three things:
   
   1. It may be that Stanza Desktop has popped up a dialog asking you whether you want to allow the device to connect. The dialog is sometimes hidden by another windows, so you may want to try moving other Stanza windows out of the way to see if it is visible. You can also bypass the need for this dialog by selecting the "Tools"->"Allow anonymous sharing" menu item and then restarting Stanza Desktop.
   2. Ensure that if your firewall is enabled, that it allows traffic to port 9562, which is the port over which Stanza shares books. Stanza also uses Apple's "Bonjour" service to broadcast the sharing service to the iPhone. If firewall problems persist, you may consider disabling the firewall altogether while you are transferring books between your devices.
   3. Your router may have a firewall enabled that is preventing your iPhone from connecting to your PC. Firewall configurations on routers vary so greatly that it isn't possible to provide generic instructions for opening access to Stanza, but you may want to consult your router's documentation for instructions on how to disable your router's popularity long enough to see if doing so allows you to share your books. Alternatively, if you have access to another wireless network, you may want to connect both your PC and your iPhone to the other network and see if the problem resolves itself.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

There have been scattered reports of this problem, but it is by no means the expected behavior: upgrades should always preserve all of your books. We believe that the problem is due to iPhone's upgrade process, whereby if something goes wrong (such as a corrupt download that it needs to re-try), then the iPhone handles it by deleting the application first, and then installing from scratch. Unfortunately, when an application is deleted from the iPhone, all of its data is deleted as well, which, in the case of Stanza, includes all of the books. However, if you have synchronized the iPhone/iPod with iTunes before you installed the update, you can restore the books from the backup by following the directions at http://www.lexcycle.com/faq/restoring_from_backup.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

Users of many other iPhone applications have reported data loss problems after installing updates, and sadly, Stanza is no exception. This is a rare bug in Apple's iPhone/iPod operating system.

There is a procedure you can follow to prevent losing your Stanza library until Apple has resolved the issue. Note that this procedure works equally well for all iPhone applications, not just Stanza.

1. Back up your iPhone by syncing it with iTunes just before you install any update.
2. Disconnect your iPhone and install the update on the device.
3. If you didn’t lose your books, all is fine. If you did lose your library, you can restore it from the backup. But you have to be very careful. When you connect your iPhone to your computer, iTunes automatically overwrites the existing backup with a new one. Since you just lost your data on the device, this will effectively delete your previous backup from iTunes! To prevent this, you need to do the following:
1. Disable automatic syncing for your iPhone in iTunes’ preferences before you connect the iPhone again (iTunes > Preferences > Syncing > Disable automatic syncing for all iPhones and iPods).
2. Connect your iPhone and wait until it appears in iTunes’ sidebar. Since syncing is disabled, iTunes won’t back up your data automatically.
3. Right-click (or control click) on the iPhone and select “Restore from backup”.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top

This is a known problem with the iPhone Operating System, and has nothing to do with Stanza itself. Any third-party application may trigger this bug. It is discussed at: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7834367. We expect that a future update to the iPhone OS will prevent this problem from happening.

• Add new comment
• Back to Top