I’ve always stayed away from eBooks, certainly the paid ones. It never felt natural to read them on a screen. But with Manning running a few great promotions, I thought I’d go for it and bought me a book or two on the cheap. Now, about reading them.
Lately, I have been using my iPod Touch for short bursts of news reading, so putting a book on it seemed like a perfect match. I tried two approaches: first using Dropbox and the build-in PDF support and, secondly, the free eBook application Stanza.
Dropbox
Dropbox is an all-purpose file-sharing application. It is not aimed at eBook in particular, but it is a great and easy way to keep them synchronized and organized across devices. Drop the eBook in PDF format in your Dropbox folder on your laptop and, a few seconds later, it is available on your iPod Touch.
One important tip: If you mark the eBook as “favorite”, Dropbox will also store it on the iPhone, so you don’t need an Internet connection to read it.
The major issue, though, is where it matters the most: the PDF reader is lacking a few options. Most importantly, it does not remember at what page you were. So every time you load the book, you have to go find page you last read. A major blocking factor for most reading.
In the end, Dropbox is a great way to keep files synchronized and backed up, but as an eBook reader, it is lacking. If you want to try it out, feel free to use this referral link, it will give us both (yes, both!) some additional free space.
Stanza
Stanza is an eBook reader by design. This means the reading is perfect. A nice big font, easy and quick page turning, and it remembers where you left.
Furthermore, Stanza has built in support for a few book stores. Some of them are free, some of them aren’t. I haven’t looked at those in detail, but the free stuff should be enough to get your fictional fix for a long time to come (search for Cory Doctorow if you want a start).
Stanza also has a mechanism to synchronize with your PC, but it’s not as transparent as Dropbox’s. The desktop client is not very advanced, plus the preview it gives is not very reliable (images are missing from the books I tried). Of course, you don’t need it that often.
A bigger problem (for me, at least) was the lacking support of PDF files. You can send PDF files to your iPod (or iPhone obviously) but the layout is rendered very badly. It’s so bad, you probably aren’t going to be able to comfortably read the book this way.
The good thing is that it properly supports most popular eBook formats (like epub and mobi). Many stores also offer this format. Manning offers this format on most eBooks, but not its Early Access books.
Conclusion
Nothing is perfect, but a combination of Stanza and Dropbox will allow you to read most of the eBooks you can find, in any location. That is, until a real eBook reader (like a Kindle) comes into my life.