While I've got your attention, I wanted to address another long-term problem - that of moving large numbers of books to the iPod without spending an unreasonable amount of time to do so. Up until recently, we really didn't have much of a viable mechanism for doing so - the introduction of the "Download All" capability opens the door to a certain extent for a solution.

Now that the "Download All" option exists on the iPod, the biggest stumbling block is actually on the PC side. The problem there is that Stanza for the PC (not too sure about the Mac - don't have one to test) has a rather nasty habit of exporting multiple entries to the "Shared Books" section of the library on the iPod - one for each book that is opened. This totally negates the value of the "Download All" feature on the iPod, as the "Download All" button only operates within a single shared library.

Now, before you point out that you can get multiple entries into a single shared library by opening a single book, selecting File->Open File-> etc., then daisy-chaining your way along until you get all the books opened, let me point out that this is *extremely* cumbersome, time consuming, and requires a great deal of navigation (especially if you have literally thousands of ebooks to look through). This, unfortunately, makes this option not particularly useful.

The alternative solution is to set up an association in Windows such that StanzaPC is the default program for opening up files that have ebook filetypes (LIT, PDB, etc.), then bring up an instance of Windows Explorer displaying your library of ebooks. You can simply walk down the list, double clicking on any books you want to move, or even selecting entire blocks of ebooks (as in all of a series) and then selecting an "Open" action. Once Stanza gets all the books opened up (could be a little while - I try to limit it to about 20 books at a time), you should theoretically be able to go to the iPod and "Download All" - and life would be good. Alas, it doesn't work that way.

What happens is that when Stanza exports these ebooks via the wifi interface, they show up in the "Shared Books" screen on the iPod as multiple libraries (not too sure of the terminology you're using), of the form Books on PCNAME, Books on PCNAME(2), Books on PCNAME(3), etc. Each of these shared "libraries" contains one (and only one) ebook - and since the "Download All" doesn't appear to work across these "libraries" it is largely ineffectual. You still have to go through them one at a time.

Without examining the code base for StanzaPC it is difficult to be certain exactly what is happening to cause this behavior, but I suspect that it is something along the line of this:
1) If you launch Stanza then go through the File->Open File process iteratively, then it appears that Stanza is creating child tasks within the same JVM. If that is the case, then one copy of the "library server/catalog server" (or whatever you call it internally) can be shared among multiple books easily - and they all show up as one Shared Library.
2) If Stanza is launched multiple times by Windows Explorer (or a batch file, or other utility), it looks as though there are multiple parallel processes (and JVMs) launched, each one having its own instance of the library server - and then we have a problem.

Now that I've bored everyone to tears, and laid the figurative groundwork, let me get to my point. Have you ever considered setting the "Library Server" component of Stanza PC up as an external service that can be shared by multiple parallel copies of Stanza? It shouldn't take too much to make that happen, and it would greatly improve the usability of the product. Failing that, can StanzaPC be set up to accept an extended list of fileids to open rather than just one? Doing this one at a time is a really cumbersome, annoying process. You could even enhance the iPod version of Stanza to do an "Update All", in which it would compare the file size/date/etc. of all the files in the shared library, then automatically download (and potentially replace) all those that have been added and/or changed.

I hope that this will generate some discussion among the community, and that we can get some kind of viable bulk transfer system implemented soon. If anyone has any better ideas, I'd certainly be interested to hear them.

Michael