What? Read on that tiny thing?

It’s still new to me so I still enjoy reading on my iPhone. It will probably get old and start to bug me, but it’s not as bad as I expected. (Kind of like writing blog entries isn’t nearly as bad as expected.) I have been tempted by Amazon’s Kindle. Obviously the technology is far superior to a backlit screen. However, aside from economic concerns, I just don’t read enough to justify it. Having just made a rather questionable economic decision in my new phone, I have decided to exploit it as much as possible.

Stanza is a neat little app that I have been using to read free public domain books. Still with Kindle drool regularly, when I got word this morning of the Kindle for iPhone app, I rushed right out to download. I set it up tonight.

Overall right now, I think Stanza is better, at least for what I am looking for. There are so many classics I haven’t read. The catalogs are huge. Having direct access within the app is a big plus here. For the Kindle app you have to go to Amazon’s site in a separate browser to purchase. The syncing process is automatic and I can see the benefit if you also have a Kindle.

I “purchased” three books from Amazon so I could compare. One was Pride and Prejudice for direct comparison to Stanza. I do think I like the text layout a bit more in the Kindle app. There is some white space around the text which is nice. The entire book is scannable on the screen via scrollbar. That’s actually a little cumbersome when there are over 4000 pages. Stanza is scannable within the current chapter only.

Strangely the navigation on the Stanza app is more like Kindle navigation than the Kindle app. For either you can swipe like other iPhone apps, but Stanza allows tapping the left or right edge of the screen to navigate between pages.

Other features the Kindle app doesn’t have are ability to change the background and viewing in landscape mode. Both of these could easily be added in a later version. The lack of background change is a definite negative for me, so I hope they change that.

What the Kindle app does have going for it is an enormous library for purchase. Since I’m mostly in it for the free stuff so far (read: bad customer) this is less important for me.

I’ll spend some more time with both and cross my fingers that the Kindle app has some updates to make up for my concerns.