It would be neat if you could replicate as close as possible the look and feel of a real book, and yet add in technological touches as well that could really personalize the experience and make ebooks worth something more than just letters on a screen. Here are some ideas that would be really cool:

- Location awareness: This is probably the biggest of all the ideas I had - make Stanza location aware so that it could do neat tricks such as the following: if you're in a coffee shop, a faint coffee stain would display in the background; if you're at an airport a faint passport stamp would display; if you're at home a jelly stain or something, etc etc. Stanza would also store these pieces of information with the book, which would be transferable back to your Stanza desktop app - metadata like all of the GPS locations where you read the book, time spent on certain pages, how many times you've read the book, when and where you first read the book, what headlines were happening in the world at that time (pulled from a news website), when you last read the book, etc, etc; and then present that metadata with some eye-candy. I found a receipt in a book I was reading once that brought back all kinds of memories of what I was doing at the time I last read the book, and this is kind of the point I'm getting at in personalizing the reading experience.

- Graphic touches: another thing we associate with physical books is the texture of books. In Stanza, you could replicate this by making pages look more lifelike with a subtle texture, give random pages a slight wrinkle here and there, and possibly even track where we touched the page, so that if we flip back a couple of pages we see a slight fingerprint (stored with the book so that next time we read it we see these things again). When we go to close an ebook, a bookmark would appear in the page before the app closed (you could even let users create their own bookmarks and share them via the app for download).

I know these are kind of bold ambitions, but I think they would make the ebook reading experience pretty incredible.

I love Stanza, but it has one minor flaw in my opinion.

I'd like to be able to download .txt ebooks over the internet from the iPhone. Add that, and Stanza will be THE greatest app ever!

I would like to be able to view the metadata associated with a book on my iPhone from the Stanza library level screens. At the moment you can only view this metadata if you have opened the book for reading.

This would have helped me with a recent scenario where I was trying to read a set of books from a series. I had quite a lot of books loaded onto the iPhone and could not remember which book was next in the series. The information about the Series and Series Number was in the book metadata so a faster way of viewing it than opening each book for reading and then selecting the metadata option from there would have been extremely useful.

I would like 2 things.

First I would like to attach a short comment that gets displayed in the Library listing. Sort of a quick note to my self about how I liked the book in case I want to reread it, or maybe a note about reading this before reading the next book in the series, or the date I last read the book, or maybe just a note that see additional comments. Something short but displayed along with the title, author, and artwork.

Second, I would like to be able to attach a note to the book so I can add additional more detailed comments.

I just put Stanza on my iPhone and I am enjoying it very much.
One feature that I wish was available for Stanza is the option to password protect it before launching the program.

Unlike my laptop, my phone seems to be a much more mobile (duh) where anyone could potentially just look at anything. Some of the content that I have on Stanza might be private or sensitive so I was hoping for having a password protection option in the future.

Thanks!

Hello

Please make it so that I can lock the font size.

Thank you for an awesome program.

Thank you very much for Stanza.
I am a newbie so forgive if need be. Is it possible to have Stanza read books aloud to me so I dont have to wait/pay for audio books? Or is there another way of doing that ?
Thanks
bc

Hi, It'd ge great to add a choice for Stanza Desktop whether set chapters manually or automatic.
Thank you

Stanza is wonderful, but there are a few more small things that could be done to make it even better:

1) Font size. It's very hard to manipulate the font size button with any kind of accuracy (actually, I find it very hard to move the button at all). And for some reason, the font size resets itself now and then. Perhaps there could be a few pre-defined font sizes, in addition to the sliding button?

2) Screen rotation. Even though I have it set to the "locked" mode, the screen still sometimes changes on me, and is very hard to shift back.

3) Moving from chapter to chapter. Why does there have to be a spinning ball on the screen every time you switch chapters?

4) Subjects. When I leave Stanza and then return to it, the program defaults to showing the "recently viewed" books, rather than keeping me in the subject I was in before.

5) Returning to books. This seems to be a memory issue. Every time I return to a book, whether it's after reading a different book, or switching apps, I have to wait while Stanza loads the whole book. I know that eReader on Palm only had to load the book the first time you opened it, and I believe it's the same situation for eReader on the iPhone (if it's not, then it's a lot quicker).

Thanks!

Hi, I have a couple of small requests (much less important than fixing all the ereader-related bugs, but still...)

Both of these requests are basically about making Stanza work as simply as eReader does when it comes to navigation.

First, the bookmarks:
It's not easy to add a bookmark in Stanza, nor is there any way of knowing if you've reached a bookmark while you're reading. Ereader's corner-tapping is much better. Also, the bookmarks could be displayed in a separate screen from the chapter index.

Second, pagination:

It would be great to have the option of continuous pagination throughout the book, rather than chapter by chapter.

A revolutions in reading? I can't upload my ebooks... I don't think this is revolutions in reading...

I'm in the same network with my PC and nothing... I don't understand why i can't upload my ebook with OpenSSH or other SFTP client...

This could be veeeeeeery easy...

I have about 4000 ebooks, and would really like to be able to batch upload books instead of having to do this one book at a time...

I would like to be able to download books that I keep on my iDisk.

The PDF to epub converter is mostly good enough but sometimes you want to see what the original PDF looked like at the point you were reading, and then return to the same point. Since the epub format is fixed, what would be good is if the Stanza Desktop could create a "correspondence file" when it creates the epub file from a .pdf, giving the correspondence of each page in the epub file to the original .pdf . Then, you would upload to the iPhone Stanza three files: the epub file, the original .pdf, and the correspondence file. In the iPhone Stanza, there'd be a button to switch to viewing the original pdf part corresponding to the current epub page, and then to switch back to the epub page once you have viewed the original pdf.

This would make Stanza usable for viewing scientific articles and in general any complex pdf.

It would be great if I could see in my list of books which books are read or unread. thx.

Can you please help me how to read vietnamese language ebooks STANZA .. THANK YOU!!

Having used Stanza for Public Domain books and eReader for purchased books ever since the apps were released I would like to request the following features, especially in view of the new arrangement with Fictionwise.

1. The option to load a complete book. I find that I don't get so immersed in a book when it's loaded chapter by chapter.

2. Bookmarks - I think they way they are implemented in eReader makes it so much easier to move around a book. Just tap the corner of the page and voila a bookmark.

3. Notes & Highlights - Once again eReader has implemented these very well.

4. Dictionary Lookup - I tried to download the Electronic Pocket Oxford English Dictionary from eReader but the download keeps failing.

I think Stanza is brilliant for reading ebooks and the above changes would, from my point of view anyway, make it perfect.

Many thanks for all your hard work and long may it continue.

I am using iPhone stanza.

I find that if I navigate down the "online Catalogs" screens, and at the end I download a book and select it for reading, then if I want to get back to the main Library screen I have to tap the centre of the screen to bring up the menu bars, and then hit the top left navigation button quite a few times to navigate backwards through the menu heirarchy before I get back to the main Library screen.

It would be nice to have a way to go directly back to the top level menu. I was thinking this would be an extra button on the menu bars displayed any time one taps the centre of the screen (in effect a Home button).

Love Stanza. It is really the most amazing and almost perfect apps for iPhone. A couple of features that i would like to have are:
1) the capability to indicate that a book has been read (i have too many ebooks that i lost track of them)
2) a 5-star rating to indicate my rating of the ebooks

Thank You so much for developing this absolutely awesome apps :)

hello
I can't access settings for turning stanza 1.6 in french
thank you for reply

I understand that you are overwhelmed with requests of every kind. :-) But could we have an option for vertical page scrolling (like in Stanza desktop) in addition to the page-flip please ? I think this suits a lot better for some kinds of books, since flick scrolling brings us quicker up and down the pages of the book, and helps scanning and locating where we are in the book. I think this is especially good for informative/ non-fiction material e.g. reading the newspaper, bible and commentaries.

Sorry, but I think 1.6 is worse than 1.5. For me.

Here are the main reasons:

1) There is no ability to change the primary online catalog to my own one. I understand that you're going to implement "book-store" feature (and, probably, through your own catalog), however I use to read in Russian and mostly own-created books, so this is real disappointment for me to add my catalog at the very bottom line there.

Can you at least allow us to add custom catalogs (with labels, eh?) to the top of the list?

2) Images inside epubs are not fit to iPhone display anymore. In case the image is large enough, the rest of it is displayed "outside the device display" :). So for books with a lot of images (e.g. technical documentation) we have to tap every image to examine it.

Can smdy give me a sort of idea what is the reason for such a change?

P.S. Reverted to 1.5 =(

It would be nice to be able to look up the definition of words from within books. I have the WeDict app installed on my iPhone, but I have to quit stanza and launch a seperate app to lookup the word.

I am currently downloading books to Stanza on my iPhone via a catalog on a web server I run on my home network. I want to make my catalog ebooks available via the public internet so I can connect to it using Stanza on my iPhone while I am away from home. To avoid making my library of books available all to all and sundry (which would break all sorts of copyright rules) I would like to make the connection back to my home server have some level of security.

The easiest way is to set it up for a username/password prompt, and I would like to be able to configure this as part of the properties for using a particular catalog. A more secure method would be ssh or vpn based, but that may be asking for too much.

If there is a way of achieving this already please let me know what it is!

Thanks so much for what you have done... A killer set of apps!

The one thing that I miss the most is a built-in dictionary to look up words.

I would love to have something exactly like the system wide look up in OS X.

Keep up the great work!

I use Stanza to catch up on reading newsletters and other text I save off the web, .rtf or .txt formats, no eBooks at all.

I would like to be able to edit the text within Stanza as I read and to transfer the edited file back to the computer, just to correct display errors in the text or strip out useless info in the body of the text or add my own notes. Highlighting, adding bold type or coloured type would be an extra bonus.

I love Stanza, have iPod touch for just two weeks now, have Stanza working for one week, v happy.

Any chance of sub-dividing the online catalogue by language? I think most people are only interested in books in one language (in my case, English), and it is a little annoying to have to wade through lots of Feedbooks titles in French, especially in the Recently Added section. Or is this something I should take up with Feedbooks?

Once you have a lot of ebooks transfered to your iPhone, any problem that requires a full recover (that doesn't allow you to use a backup for that recovery) makes all that effort useless. I've seen a few applications on the iTunes App Store that use SyncDocs that might be a good way to make backups:

http://syncdocs.sourceforge.net/

Their FAQ lists the apps that currently use it. I've tried it with XpenseTracker and it seems pretty fast.

After Stanza desktop open an Acrobat PDF file with embedded highlighting, it will cause the file to display irregular highlights once the file is re-open with Acrobat.

Wondering if any else experiences the same problem...