Entries tagged with “stanza” from Tools of Change for Publishing
Amazon Acquires Lexcycle
Mac Slocum
April 27, 2009
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Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza, has just announced it's been acquired by Amazon:
We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition. Customers will still be able to browse, buy, and read ebooks from our many content partners. We look forward to offering future products and services that we hope will resonate with our passionate readers.
The New York Times says terms of the deal have not been released. It's not yet known how Stanza will fit amidst Amazon's Kindle and recently-released Kindle iPhone app.
Karen Templer from the Readerville Weblog poses a number of key questions:
Will the Stanza/Fictionwise store be replaced with a Stanza/Amazon store? (Presumably.) And/or will Stanza be merged with the Kindle app? Will it continue to read ePub and other formats or will it conform strictly to Kindle? (Conversely, will Kindle begin reading ePub?) And, most of all, where does this leave IndieBound and their ebook plans?
Open Publishing Distribution System -- an Open-Standards Catalog Format
Andrew Savikas
April 8, 2009
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It's no secret we're big fans of the iPhone/iPod reading app Stanza. While the Kindle App has overtaken Stanza for the top-spot among free book apps in iTunes, Stanza offers a much better reading experience than the Kindle App (for example, by supporting standard formatting like tables and whitespace-preservation) (Update: You can use the latest version of mobigen.exe to get better whitespace-preservation (from <pre> and friends) on the Kindle.) And I'm not the only one who feels that way: "Stanza is hands-down the best e-book reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and its free. Go. Get it now." (Wired.com).
But more than the quality of the software, the major reason I'm so bullish on Stanza is their willingness to experiment. When our own Keith Fahlgren suggested they use the standard Atom format for their catalog system, they responded:
We wound up taking your advice and implemented support for Atom for Stanza's catalog format. Thanks for the suggestion! Using the Atom standard is much better than using our own custom format (although we may need to eventually extend the custom format with our own tags).
And when we proposed using Stanza to create a standalone book app (for iPhone: The Missing Manual), they were eager to dive in head first, and we both learned a lot in the process.
That Atom-based Online Catalog feature turned out to be an interesting prototype for a distributed digital discovery and ecommerce system, and it's awesome to see them willing to embrace the potential for such a system well beyond the boundaries their own product, and to join with Peter Brantley and the Internet Archive in laying the groundwork for what's being called the Open Publication Distribution System:
Users of compatible Reading Systems, in addition to being able to access content they have previously acquired or acquire via other means, are also able to access a catalog (list of online sources of content). Typically, the catalog offers a number of free titles, which may be hosted by the Reading System vendor and/or other sites, as well as the opportunity to purchase or borrow paid content from stores and libraries. Additional stores and libraries may be added by the user to their personal catalog. The mechanism through which compatible Reading Systems access the distributed catalog has three components: eBook content, XML catalog metadata, and an HTTP transport for the catalog. The remainder of this document will discuss each of those components in turn.
One of the reasons we've thrown our support behind the Bookworm online ebook reading system as part of O'Reilly Labs is to help support the development and testing of new standards like this one, and we're excited to contribute to this new initiative. It's also great to see Adobe support this as well, and is a nice follow on to our work with them on EPUB output for the open-source DocBook XSL stylesheets.
O'Reilly Ebooks Now In Stanza Online Catalog
Andrew Savikas
March 9, 2009
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Just in time for Read an Ebook Week O'Reilly's 400+ ebooks are now available for direct purchase and download on your iPhone or iPod Touch from within Stanza's Online Catalog. Buying ebooks this way gives you the same flexible, DRM-free ebook bundles as buying through oreilly.com (because you are buying from oreilly.com via Stanza). That means 3 ebook formats and free lifetime updates (and did we mention no DRM?).
To celebrate the Stanza news (and Read an Ebook Week) you'll automatically get 40% off any ebooks purchased on Stanza through March 15 for a limited time.
If you have Stanza on your iPhone or iPod (it's free -- click here to get it), here's how to get to the O'Reilly Ebook Store. From your Stanza Library, click the Online Catalog link:
From there, select "O'Reilly Ebooks" to browse by Bestsellers, New Releases, or All titles:
Select the title you want to see a description:
Press "Add to Cart" to buy the ebook, which will take you through to the O'Reilly shopping cart to complete the transaction (you'll need to create an O'Reilly account if you don't already have one). We're working to make the purchase experience a bit more mobile friendly, but wanted to roll this out right away. There is an awkward step when you'll see what appears to be some gibberish in a confirmation dialog -- go ahead and click download:
We're working with the Stanza folks to try and make that a little cleaner.
If your download is interrupted -- or if you ever want to re-download an ebook you've already purchased -- you can always return to your purchased ebooks by visiting the "My Bookshelf" link from the O'Reilly Catalog in Stanza (or by pointing your iPhone to oreilly.com/e or visiting members.oreilly.com from any web browser):
We'll be adding new titles, free samples, and more ways to browse, search, and sort in the coming weeks.
Popping the Hood on the iPhone Missing Manual App
Andrew Savikas
February 4, 2009
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Over on Teleread, Chris Meadows has a nice review of our iPhone Missing Manual app, which echoes several other reviewers (and my own personal experience with the app):
How helpful is the book? I have already found a lot of remarkably useful information just in the space of a few chapters. It would be no exaggeration to say I learned things over the course of a couple of hours of reading that I never learned in months of iPod Touch ownership.
But the neatest part of the review is the tutorial Chris provides for popping the app open and getting at the EPUB content inside:
Once you've unzipped it, it can be read in ePub-reading software such as Adobe Digital Editions (looks flawless) or FBReader (formatting a bit messed up), or even synced into the iPhone version of Stanza by sharing from Stanza Desktop. (Though as the book is almost 9 megabytes in size thanks to all the illustrations, the Stanza app may choke and require a reboot the first time you load it, but after that it opens fine. I suspect the wrapper version of Stanza is optimized for the book's large size.)
Chris is right that the electronic version available from oreilly.com is $24.99, compared with the $9.99 app (on sale right now for $4.99 in conjunction with the TOC Conference), though our "ebook bundle" includes EPUB, PDF, and Mobipocket formats, along with free updates. That said, we're tracking sales and price data across formats and platforms, because it's clearly a critical issue. The App Store has provided an easy way to measure price elasticity of demand, and that's just with one app!
Experimental O'Reilly Ebook iPhone Integration with Stanza
Andrew Savikas
November 25, 2008
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UPDATE: The Stanza integration is no longer experimental. All of O'Reilly's ebook bundles are now available for sale in the Stanza online catalog.
Back in August, I showed how to read O'Reilly EPUB ebooks on an iPhone (or iPod Touch) using the popular (and free) Stanza reader app. I'm pleased to announce that you can now directly download EPUB ebooks purchased from O'Reilly on your iPhone to Stanza. The integration is experimental for now, as we iron out some kinks and work to make our own site more iPhone-friendly.
These instructions assume that:
- You've purchased one or more O'Reilly ebook bundles from oreilly.com (as of this writing, there are 57 total titles available -- an updated list is available at oreilly.com/ebooks).
- You have an iPhone or iPod Touch with the Stanza App installed
To download one of your O'Reilly ebooks to Stanza, follow these instructions (if you're reading this post via RSS, you may need to click through to the original post to see the screenshots):
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On your iPhone (or iPod Touch) open Safari and go to http://members.oreilly.com
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After signing in, navigate to the Electronic Media tab.
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If you zoom in, you'll see that among the download options, there's now a "Stanza ePub" button. Press the button to begin downloading (to scroll the list of titles, use a two-fingered vertical drag -- again, this is experimental, and we are working on a better iPhone UI).
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Pressing that button will open Stanza and download the book.
This kind of integration was simple and straightforward in large part because many of the moving parts around Stanza are based on open standards, including EPUB and the Atom Publishing Protocol (both successful and important XML standards that publishers should be paying attention to -- find out more at January's StartWithXML forum in New York).
Thanks to Marc Prud'hommeaux at Lexcycle for working with us on the integration, and to our own Nick Pilon for connecting the plumbing on our end. Marc will be talking about Stanza and about reading on the iPhone at February's TOC Conference.
Ebook to iPod to Hard Copy Purchase
Peter Brantley
November 18, 2008
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Hugh McGuire is loving Stanza, the free ereader app for the iPhone/iPod Touch. From the Book Oven Blog:
40,000 ebook dowloads-a-day. I've got 35 of them sitting on my iPod. If you are a publisher, think long and hard about that number.
The reason I have 35 books downloaded onto my Stanza is: a) it is easy, b) it is free.
What does this mean for your business model? I don't know, but I assure you that when I finish War & Peace, I'll be buying a hard copy. And I also assure you: I love reading on that little thing.
Stanza E-Reader Catching On with iPhone Users
Peter Brantley
September 22, 2008
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VentureBeat writes about the success of Lexcycle's Stanza e-reader for the iPhone, and speculates that this type of platform will be far more successful than dedicated reader devices:
Stanza is currently the number one ebook app for the iPhone, and chief operating officer Neelan Choksi shared some other impressive stats with me. In its first six weeks, Stanza was downloaded 200,000 times -- compare that to Amazon's Kindle, which is seen as building momentum because it sells 40,000 units per month. Okay, that's a totally unfair comparison, since Stanza is a free app. But if you can get a free ebook reader for your iPhone, why bother paying for the Kindle, or even a more cutting-edge reader like Plastic Logic's? (Though of course the Amazon's and Plastic Logic's readers offer bigger screens, which is better for long-term reading.) People are actually downloading books, too -- Choksi says one of Stanza's content providers reports 20,000 downloads per day.
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