Stanza Replacement on iPad with iOS 5

[Donka]

Ah I see it now.

But it is not clear to a regular visitor the App store imho. Also what the heck is "Package A" ?

However their customers support seems very responsive and I expect they will iron this out.

Yip, I do wish they would put in the description the difference between the free and paid for versions so you know exactly what your money is getting you. It can be ambiguous at times.

 

[Donka]

I decided to take a punt on readMe. Bit of a mistake if I am being honest. Feature wise it seems a good app although performance is horrible. It literally takes 10+ seconds to open a book that my other ereaders including iBooks and Bluefire will open in less than a second. Opening up contents and tapping a link has you waiting for what seems like an age - it appears to have hung and then eventually opens up at the correct place - another 10-15 seconds later. I'm also not too keen on the formatting - paragraphs just don't seem to be spaced out very well and there is no real way for the user to improve this. A shame really because if they improved these two things then it may be a worthwhile reader. As things stand, it is just too frustrating to use at the moment.

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I found the perfect replacement for me. ShuBook by Ambibma Ltd. has nearly every feature of Stanza (that I used) and maybe a few it didn't. One drawback is no support for PDF, but ePub format is spot on. (You can convert your PDF's to ePub in Calibre anyway.) It has lock orientation, auto lock disable, background and text color customization, touch+hold copy and define, table of content navigation and bookmarks. It even lets you add your own true type fonts. The app is free to try and has a $1.99 in app purchase to remove ads and enable iTunes and advanced features. It was last updated on 10/14/2011 and with the in-app purchase it should have much better support than Stanza had over the last year. Although not explicitly stated, it is iOS5 compatible.

Note: In the App Store, ShuBook first appears to be a Chinese only app. If you read the full description, it definitely supports English as well. (Basically supporting both vertical and horizontal languages)

ShuBook iTunes Page - http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/shubook/id385897279?mt=8

Can you tell if it will let you save a custom night time scheme as well? I see colours are locked out unless you buy Package A but if purchasing this lets me save a colours scheme for both day and night reading so I don't need to keep altering each time I open the app then I could be sold.

 

[saoir]

Can you tell if it will let you save a custom night time scheme as well? I see colours are locked out unless you buy Package A but if purchasing this lets me save a colours scheme for both day and night reading so I don't need to keep altering each time I open the app then I could be sold.

Yes you can set it to night reading in the in-book settings. also orientation lock and many other things. Also to show file type. Also the ability to change brightness by sliding up and down the screen.

 

[Donka]

Yes you can set it to night reading in the in-book settings. also orientation lock and many other things. Also to show file type. Also the ability to change brightness by sliding up and down the screen.

Yes, I know you can set night time reading in the settings. The problem is most apps have this configured as white on black text. I personally prefer black on a dull yellow for night time reading. My question is can I set this night time mode to black on yellow and save that so every time I select night time mode, it automatically changes to black on yellow instead of white on black or whatever the built in night time mode is?

 

[MaxBurn]

Yes, I know you can set night time reading in the settings. The problem is most apps have this configured as white on black text. I personally prefer black on a dull yellow for night time reading. My question is can I set this night time mode to black on yellow and save that so every time I select night time mode, it automatically changes to black on yellow instead of white on black or whatever the built in night time mode is?

ubooks allows you to have a day and night preset and you can customize each to whatever you want.

 

[Donka]

ubooks allows you to have a day and night preset and you can customize each to whatever you want.

I didn't get on with uBooks. Had it previously on Pocket PC but it hasn't translated too well to IOS imho. Some features were nice but I think it was mostly how it handled formatting that I didn't like with it. It also seemed to have a transition page between night and day modes when changing.

 

[saoir]

Yes, I know you can set night time reading in the settings. The problem is most apps have this configured as white on black text. I personally prefer black on a dull yellow for night time reading. My question is can I set this night time mode to black on yellow and save that so every time I select night time mode, it automatically changes to black on yellow instead of white on black or whatever the built in night time mode is?

Jeez you're picky

It seems, from playing with it a bit today, that the night time setting is black on white, adjustable in brightness.
Ordinary setting can be set to your choice of colours, including black on a gentle yellow, using colour sliders.

 

[Donka]

Jeez you're picky

It seems, from playing with it a bit today, that the night time setting is black on white, adjustable in brightness.
Ordinary setting can be set to your choice of colours, including black on a gentle yellow, using colour sliders.

Thanks. That's what I was worried about. I don't why they let you change day time but not night time and assume you only want white on black.
Bring back Stanza!

 

[IrishVixen]

Yes, Bluefire does not work on jailbroken devices. One of the developers who posts on on the Mobileread.com forum has said they are aware of this problem and would look into it.

Thanks! Been a while since I hung out on MobileRead. Unfortunately, more digging produced statements that while the Bluefire devs know what's wrong, they don't intend to fix it, and their suggestion is to use a workaround that isn't going to work under iOS 5.

So, now I'm back to finding an ePub reader that works well with Dropbox on a JB'd device...thank heavens most of my library is Kindle-based.

 

[Stanzalover]

Edit book details

Which of the eReaders out there allow you to edit book details? That was one of my favorite functions in Stanza. Does i2reader allow this?

 

[galenmd]

I am surprised that no one has recommended using Acrobat as a simple reader for pdfs. I just tried it. The rendering of pages is incredibly fast, even better than Stanza was for large (100MB) files. Also, I found using Calibre to convert complex pdfs with graphics was inaccurate and disappointing.

I am trying out Shubooks for my .epub's.

 

[yabloko]

uBooks wins

I tried ShuBooks, BluFire, and uBooks. The latter is easily the best of the three. Most importantly, it fills the whole screen with text once you disable the status bar. You can change the size of the text precisely. For the other two apps you can only proceed in big steps. Colors are adjustable as well. It has a reasonable menu which includes Library, TOC, day/night mode switch, text search. Library can be sorted by Author, Title, Genre. This book info can be edited. Page flipping is simple and pleasant, you can choose automatic scrolling, but it looks just a tiny bit jerky. I uploaded by dropping into iTunes, but wi-fi options are there too: browser and ftp. Takes both epub and fb2. There is translation of selected words, but I didn't test it and don't know how it works. To summarize, this is a no-frills practical app, which just does what it is supposed to do. The free version has some ads in the menu but not in the text. In fact, I might think twice before switching back to Stanza once they fix it.

 

[MaxBurn]

I tried ShuBooks, BluFire, and uBooks. The latter is easily the best of the three. Most importantly, it fills the whole screen with text once you disable the status bar. You can change the size of the text precisely. For the other two apps you can only proceed in big steps. Colors are adjustable as well. It has a reasonable menu which includes Library, TOC, day/night mode switch, text search. Library can be sorted by Author, Title, Genre. This book info can be edited. Page flipping is simple and pleasant, you can choose automatic scrolling, but it looks just a tiny bit jerky. I uploaded by dropping into iTunes, but wi-fi options are there too: browser and ftp. Takes both epub and fb2. There is translation of selected words, but I didn't test it and don't know how it works. To summarize, this is a no-frills practical app, which just does what it is supposed to do. The free version has some ads in the menu but not in the text. In fact, I might think twice before switching back to Stanza once they fix it.

Did you buy it? I haven't seen what that does, just remove adds or does it add something else?

I generally agree, it displays and has some really nice reading functionality.

Small thing, I noticed that ubooks doesn't load the books right away, it waits until you select them. Stanza loaded them right away so it would display the book metadata. ubooks displays the file name and then after it has been loaded it will display the metadata in the names / authors sections. Books that aren't loaded yet don't even show up in names / authors.

 

[tvferret]

Hi, I was devastated by the recent Stanza death so I started looking at possible replacement. Currently, I find uBooks the only one that is usable, barely though. I also made an attemtp at ShuBook but ... when I load epub books I only get first page (well, cover only). ShuBook reports that the book has only one page. This happens to 9 out of 10 books I tried. Only one book worked for me.

Any ideas what might be causing this?

 

[Donka]

Stanza has been updated with IOS5 support.

 

[MaxBurn]

Stanza has been updated with IOS5 support.

Fantastic news, thanks for mentioning!

 

[tekchic]

Stanza has been updated for iOS5 as Donka mentioned, however, Amazon did "sunset" the app, meaning no more updates beyond this one.

http://www.macworld.com/article/163524/2011/11/amazon_updates_sunsets_stanza_app.html

I bit the bullet way back with iOS5 beta 2 and finally got accustomed to using iBooks. I would pay $5 (for starters) for an iOS Universal app that could do everything that Stanza could (and sync bookmarks between my iPhone and iPad)

 

[MaxBurn]

Anyone try Kobo? I ran across that and with a store behind it I think it would stick around. Haven't really looked at the interface.