Stanza review

Clare Hopping

We review Stanza, an eBook reader for the iPhone with a built in catalogue

Published on Sep 28, 2009

One thing the App store is not short of is eBook readers, but Stanza is one of the most intuitive to use.

When you fire Stanza up, you’re taken to your library. At first, there’s not much to choose from, but enter the Online Catalog and you’re taken to the biggest book store in the world.

You can decide where you buy your eBooks from, although unfortunately, most sites are American, so you’re charged in dollars.

However, all is not lost with a selection of free books on offer, many are classics that you probably read at school.

We opted for The Iliad by Homer. The book took a matter of seconds to download and we headed back to the homescreen and selected our recently downloaded novel from the Titles section without issue.

To turn pages using Stanza, you tap the right hand side of the screen. Tap on the left side to go back a page. Tap in the centre and you can view the controls and see how far through the book you are. You can use a slider at the bottom if you want to skip to a specific section and search the text too.

There are a number of handy options including night mode which changes the background to black and text to white, plus change the size of text, font and background colour to your preference.

Stanza is an in-depth eBook reader for those that can stand reading books on the small screen of an iPhone. It's nothing revolutionary, but the number of books to choose from makes up for its simplicity.