Stanza

Stanza

Version: v.3.2

Compatibility: iOS 3.0

Price: Free

Thanks to touchscreens and e-ink displays, reading on the go has never been more accessible. If you're a smartphone addict like I am, your iPhone or Touch is probably never far away at any given moment. For the love of reading, e-readers are cheap and light, but an app is lighter, cheaper and even more convenient. The big dogs of the e-reader world (Kindle, Nook, Kobo) are available but aren't the best option for those of us who like to manually sync our own ebook and pdf libraries. When iBooks started getting sluggish, I gave Stanza a shot.

Since manga makes up a significant percentage of my digital library, Stanza was highly recommended as a one stop for everything literature including the popular cbz/cbr file format most digital comics are saved in. Stanza is favoured by publications such as Time Magazine, New York Times, Wired, PC Magazine and Forbes for being the best app to fit entire bookshelves into the palm of your hand. I love how it doesn't fill up the screen clumsily with buttons and menus. Books can also be downloaded from several partner stores as well as offering 50,000 free classics to choose from.

My one problem with the app is the look of it. There are many options to choose from for font, background, colours and all that jazz, but presets are virtually non existent. I dont want to choose from 30 or so background images which are really distracting or dozens of fonts that make it hard to read. Black text on white is hard to deal with as well thats why I choose sepia in iBooks. But choosing something takes awhile and when you're reading you want to go back into settings and looks for a better one. And thats not what I want from a reading app.

Compared next to iBooks, I prefer iBooks a short margin for the look but the lag in load makes Stanza a little better. Pick your poison.