Stanza, it’s pure poetry

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As I have mentioned before, on one of my blogs we sell ebooks, and although it’s far from a passive income it does ok.

I have been musing lately where the technology is going with regard to ‘e-readers’ and debating whether my target market will have a Kindle. After some research I found they don’t have Kindles or the intention of getting one in the next 12 months. But they are changing from their usual smartphones over to the iPhone.

Those of us that work with ebooks know that PDFs are near impossible to read on an iPhone, I have never managed it yet. I am sure we all have a friend-of-a-friend who has done it, but I never have.The alternative is to have your ebook in a different reading format or even going down the published book route.

Like most things, it’s when you are at the point of giving up you find something really useful.

Stanza.

Stanza has a desktop app and an iPhone app.

• Download the iphone app
• Download the desktop app
• Drop your ebook into the app (ok, it’s a little more than one line but it’s still very easy to do)
• Sync it with the iPhone app

Lo and behold you can read your PDF based ebook on your iPhone

Stanza download page link

Yup, it’s really that simple. If you find it tough or awkward the first couple of time, then you can take a peek at the FAQs where they have totally idiot proof instructions (which was a relief to me, as I often forget how to do something after doing it once). The forums are active sharing information, which I always see as a positive sign

The downside, images don’t show in the ebooks to save resources. I am happy for that to happen as images are not a big part of the ebooks we sell, the images complement the content rather than make up the content.

For me, all I have to do is add an instruction page on how to do it and my future ebook readers have another way of reading my ebooks, and at the moment although still in beta testing phase Stanza is far more cost effective than mucking about with getting Kindle/Amazon approved. For us, Kindle is something to review in 12 months time.

What I love the most about Stanza is when I tap the edge of the screen, the page flips over, just like turning the page of a book. Whilst I don’t think ebooks will ever replace real -hold-in-your-hand-drop-in-the-bath-books, I do think it has excellent learning applications.

What do you think?

Will you be using Stanza to make your ebook more accessible?

Sarah

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About Sarah Arrow
Sarah Arrow is the managing editor of Birds on the Blog, in real life she is the communications director of a same day courier service. She is an enthusiastic UK based pro-blogger and co- author of the soon to be published Zero to Blogger
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