International Law

New Version of Stanza for iPhone!

By Stan

This is definitely one of my non-China related posts, but I wanted to show my appreciation for this new tech.

When I got to China, I had very little entertainment available. Lack of TV was bad enough, but it was the scarcity of good reading material that almost drove me insane. There were always hundreds of books in the house when I was growing up, and even if it was 2:00am, and I couldn’t sleep, I could go raid my father’s library. Moreover, there was always the town library. At college, law school, and grad school, fiction was always easy to come by at the school library, and whatever city I was living in, I could always count on the local library.

So when I got here and found that the only source of books was the Foreign Language Bookstore at Wangfujing, where I could mostly just buy Penguin Classics, it was painful. There were several trips to the U.S. when I came back with a suitcase full of used paperbacks, and rationed them to myself as needed.

This explains my heartfelt appreciation for the Net and the easy access to fiction it has brought. From the time I got my first Palm Pilot quite a few years ago, I have never been at a loss for something good to read. Since then, platforms have gotten better and better, the ability to convert different file formats has improved, and the hardware has markedly advanced.

I am currently reading stuff on my iPhone, and the Stanza ebook platform is really killer. You can open just about anything on your PC (including PDFs and Lit files) and send it to your iPhone via WiFi. Formatting options and organizational tools are really great these days compared to software I have used before.

The only problems I have right now:

1. The Stanza file converter does PDF, but not well. Basically the formatting gets scrambled so you lose chapters, text justification, etc. Makes it quite annoying when reading, but not impossible. I have heard that this is a problem with Adobe and its tough stance on proprietary info. I assume it’s the fault of some IP lawyer out there!

2. The iPhone book platform needs a scroller/button on the side of the device one can use to advance a book without using the touch screen, which can be awkward. It might sound stupid, not to mention tremendously lazy, but sometimes I’m sitting there eating and reading at the same time, and it is tough to turn the page with one hand. I shouldn’t have to put down my chopsticks so I can turn the page! It’s also problematic on the subway or a bus, where you really should hold on to something with one hand.

Anyway, two very big thumbs up for the software and the update, which has a lot of good stuff in it, including the dim/bright control and the page progress bar — it’s the small things that make a difference when you’re reading books.

© Stan for China Hearsay, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us

Full post as published by China Hearsay on April 08, 2009 (boomark / email).