Stanza beta 4 released
Tue, 06/03/2008 - 11:35 — marc
We are happy to announce the release Stanza 1.0 beta 4! You can download it from http://www.lexcycle.com/download.
This release fixed the two major issues people found with beta 3: the inability to launch Stanza in Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger), and the inability to read books that were exported to the Kindle.
Please enjoy this new release, and, as always, your feedback, bug reports, and opinions are all welcome and appreciated.
About Us | Contact Lexcycle | Site Map | RSS Feeds | Media Info | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy
Copyright © 2009 Lexcycle, Inc. All rights reserved. 
Stanza for Palm Pre
I hope that you will have a version available for the Palm Pre when it is released. I have been using eReader and MobiPocket to read ebooks on my Palm Treo 650 and am planning to upgrade to the Pre when I can afford it. If Stanza works, I will be very happy to get it when I get my Pre.
reply
Love the idea of the program... would be nice if it could organize your stuff as well in an iTunes sort of way. Also, editing the metadata would be a great addition. These two changes would be the difference in me buying it or not.
alarm systems
It's interesting you should
It's interesting you should mention those features, since they are both already well supported in Stanza for the iPhone! Stanza is completely free for both the iPhone and for personal computers running Mac OS and Windows.
BTW...
1. Use the plus-sign on the top-level Library page to organize your books into collections.
2. Use the Edit button while you are viewing your books as a list to select a book whose metadata you'd like to edit.
3. In Stanza Desktop, you can edit metadata by selecting View->Book Info
Export books and copying to Palm
I have a Macintosh Core2 Duo iMac with system 10.5.3 installed. Also Palm Zire 72 with SD card. I have copied several files that I have exported from Stanza onto the SD card and copied those files onto the RAM of the Palm with FileMan. Those files cannot be seen with FileZ 6.8.2 7/14/05 or with FileMan apps. I was not able to read them with ReadThemAll, or with Plucker as I could not see them. I was able to read one file from SD card with iSilo 4.31. I have lost about 5% of space on my Palm and I cannot find those files to delete them, which I sorely would like to do. I am hoping that your program will work to open books and export to my Palm. Also, the one file I was able to read with iSilo, save in Palm .pdb format, the last bit was truncated in the file, i.e. I could read it in Stanza, but it was not on the Palm. Not seeing files on the Palm, that are on the SD card is a serious problem, and one that I have not experienced with any other files. I was always able to delete files that I coped before. I am a very experienced Mac user and Palm user. Thanks for any advice. Glad to help, but not anxious to have to restore my Palm to recover the space from those files. Thanks for any help.
ijudy
RE: Export books and copying to Palm
Thanks for taking the time to let us know about the problem. We haven't heard it reported before, but I don't think anyone has yet tested with the Palm Zire. The new beta we released today (beta 5) does fix a couple problems with exporting to the palm format (specifically, it should fix the truncation problem), but I doubt it will help with the missing files issue.
I assume that the only indication that the files are still on the device and are taking up 5% of the device's memory is that you knew how much memory had been available before you copied the files over, and you are seeing that the current memory allocation is taking that much more? Also, it is possible that the one file you are able to see in iSilo is responsible for that entire memory consumption? That is, if you delete the one file, how much of the memory is made available to you?
Also, for the one file you are able to see in iSilo, are you also able to see that file with FileZ or FileMan (or both)? If so, what is the location of the file, and are you able to delete it with either of the file management tools?
We hope we can help you sort out this issue, and we do apologize for the inconvenience it has clearly caused. We are working hard to support as many devices as possible, and we look forward to getting Stanza's exported files running on your device.
Export books and copying to Palm
Re: "I assume that the only indication that the files are still on the device and are taking up 5% of the device's memory is that you knew how much memory had been available before you copied the files over, and you are seeing that the current memory allocation is taking that much more? " - YES. I see that the remaining space is now less. I can see the files on the SD card, but I cannot see them once I copy them over from the card to the internal memory of the Palm Zire 72, using FileMan v3.3. I got a MobiPocket file and installed MobiPocket and I was able to read that file on the Palm. But when I converted files to MobiPocket with Stanza, those files became invisible in the Palm RAM. Also, they had a different extension when the file was saved in MobiPocket format, than the file that I downloaded that was already in MobiPocket format.
The file that I can see in isilo is a file from the SD card. When I take out the card I can no longer see that file from isilo. Can you recommend a file format that would be best to convert to for the Palm? I think that, at least for awhile, I won't copy files to memory as I will have to restore from an old backup to recover that space when I have the time. I will try and take a look at beta 5 and copy files to the card and see how well they work, as I can see those on the Mac with a card reader.
I could see the files on the card. I was able to see their TYPE and CREATORs with Filez but when I filtered the files in RAM to look for those files I could not find them with Filez. In that respect Filez is more useful than FileMan. I use the later to copy files from the card to the Palm, and I can get the file details with Filez.
OK, I made some progress. I had MobiPocket open on the Palm and I noticed that a file opened up that I didn't think was on the card. I found that it's name was (small rectangular box).mobi. By looking at the files that MobiPocket could see I also found another file called "unknown". In Filez, I found 2 files called "..." at the top of the list, and the "unknown" file. I think these are the files that I copied. (Hooray!)
I took an .ebook file from feedbooks.com and I tried converting it to as many formats as I could. I have a (VERY OLD) iSiloX v4.32 and I converted the file to .html, .htm, .pdb and .prc. I tried reading the file in iSilo and i think it did a poor job of converting the files from HTML an HTML4, as many words were hyphenated. The one version that worked was the Palm Database format. The file was still truncated though using the beta5.
I got MobiPocket to look at the card for files, but it couldn't see any. Perhaps it wants them to be in a particular folder of the card?
Keep up the good work.
ijudy
RE: Export books and copying to Palm
It sounds like you were able to recover the lost space. Excellent! We're not sure why the file names would have been so strange, though. Is it possible there were accented characters in the title of the files you saved? That may have lead to Stanza saving the characters in the filename, which may not have been understood by the palm.
The hyphenation issue is odd: Stanza inserts "soft hyphens" in words, which are supposed to be invisible unless they come at the end of a line-break. It sounds like iSilo isn't respecting that, and is displaying them as "hard hyphens". We'll look into allowing you to configure whether or not to save with soft hyphens.
If you export the file as "Plain Text", is iSilo then able to display it successfully?
Export books and copying to Palm
I have copied files to Palm for years and I don't think there were special characters. I'm from the U.S. and there was more than one file with that problem. I don't think there were any special characters, AND I don't think the file names were particularly long either.
The hyphenation issue is possibly an Isilo issue. I don't think very highly of the Macintosh Isilo file converter. It's pretty old.
I would not use iSilo to read a plain text file. It's strength is that it displays some font styles, and pictures. For plain text I'd just use another program. I prefer ReadThemAll, which is free and has 3 auto-scrolling options.
I am interested in using Stanza with the Palm and potentially with an ipod Touch, when the platform matures with some good 3rd party software. I've been looking to Apple to provide the update for my Palm organizer for many years now - since folks got Linux to run on their ipods. As you might be thinking, I am hoping that the iPhone/iPod Touch will be the device that gains widespread acceptance for electronic books. I know I've been reading them predominantly since approx. 1998 on various Palm organizers. It's nice to have a version of Stanza for reading books on my Mac, but I think most people would rather read books on a portable device that provides a good reading experience. Therefore I look forward to you debugging Stanza so that all the conversion formats work. Thanks.
Formatting
I like the way Stanza displays text in columns. It's a great reading experience on a computer monitor, something I previously didn't know was possible.
One thing that I have discovered that really bothers me is the lack of italics and bold type.
This makes following some storylines really hard. Any chance we'll get italics and bold type ?
Formatting
It is true that Stanza strips out all the formatting it sees. We are planning, however, on allowing some minor formatting hints to be included. Specifically, we do plan on allowing boldface and italicization in the near future.
Thanks for the words of praise, and please do continue to let us know any further feedback, bug reports, or questions you might have!