Stanza + Fictionwise = More eBook Choices

A number of months ago Jamie wrote about her fondness for the eBook program Stanza. Personally I tend to be an eReader  kind of guy but that was largely because of its ability to access two commercial e-book sites (eReader.com and Fictionwise) and purchase and download books over the air.

That changed yesterday when Stanza  announced a new partnership with Fictionwise. Fictionwise has been growing by leaps and bounds and recently took over eReader.com.  Now with its new partnership it’s available on yet another platform — and it’s always a good thing.

The announcement of a prompted me to take another look at Stanza and, overall, I’m pretty impressed.

It’s a lightweight reader that responds rather quickly and offers a good deal of configuration so that you can get text in pretty much the format that will work for you. In addition, it provides access to a large number of online catalogs in addition to the aforementioned Fictionalize bookstore, it provides access to Feedbooks, a variety of high school books, newspaper and magazine and RSS feeds, and Project Gutenberg, which is a great way to get free books. It also indicated that you can get access to your eReader  bookshelf and while, for some reason, it didn’t work yesterday, when I tried it today and fired up immediately. The result is that I now have a choice between two different readers. Both of them are excellent and it’s as yet unclear which I’ll end up using.

What I do want to know is why I can access my eReader bookshelf from within Stanza but apparently not my Fictionwise bookshelf (I own books on both). Since Fictionwise owns all of them it doesn’t make much sense to me.

The one thing missing from both, however, is an auto scroll feature such as the one available with Instapaper Pro.  It’s something I’m looking forward to  and hope to see soon.

If you haven’t taken a look at Stanza now would be a good time to do so. It’s available here in the iTunes apps store and it’s free.