Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Electronic Readers

Hi All,

My electronic reader (Ebookwise) recently broke when my husband accidentally knocked it off the end table. I've been offered a Sony reader at a reduced price by someone who has barely used it. I was just wondering if anyone here had used the Sony reader (I use it primarily for fanfiction) and if it is hard to upload txt files or something similar.

Any comments or recommendations would be appreciated. I'm going to have to decide soon though, because it's hard to read fanfic at night in bed w/o my reader...I'm having withdrawals!

Thanks,
Francesca

I can't comment on it, but I would swear by my iPod Touch with the free Stanza app installed...It's the only way I have time to read fanfic. (I download the fiction from the net, use the PC version of Stanza to convert it into the appropriate format, download it to my iPod, and away I go.) I like the fact that it has a much smaller form factor than the dedicated readers, and so I can easily carry it in a pocket or a purse. Plus, if I am going to spend hundreds of dollars, I would like something more versatile than a dedicated e-reader. (I guess a large part of the equation is just how reduced the price is on the Sony reader your husband has been offered.)

I have found the iPod's small screen does not get in the way of my reading pleasure at all. Of course YMMV.

Just another option to consider.

cheers,
Lynn

I'm another one who doesn't know anything about the Sony reader, but I wanted to let Lynn and others using the iPod Touch know that there is an app called GoodReader that will let you download and read large .pdf and .txt files. You can download files directly over wifi and the app cost me a whopping 99 cents. I've only used it for a couple of fanfics, but it worked well with those.

Thanks for the heads-up. So far, Stanza has been able to handle anything I have thrown at it. It is true that it does take a few seconds to convert the files to the epub format, but so far, that hasn't proved at all onerous. But I will keep GoodReader in mind should I decide I want a different app. Thanks.

cheers,
Lynn

Lynn, I'm with you on Stanza. Fantastic app for the iPod Touch! I've tried a few other document reader apps and Stanza is by far the best. I read fanfic on it too.

Stanza has a bonus feature for people who download stories from the fanfic archive in that it automatically formats the text from fixed line length back to fluid, so there are no awkward line breaks.

My absolute favorite feature, though, is that it lets you control font and type size, foreground color and background color.

I like to read just before going to sleep, and with the lights out, the brightness needs to be toned down or it feels like the light from the iPod is stabbing my eyeballs. Thankfully I've found a soothing color mix that's kind to the eyes. Talk about a headache, try reading something on the Kindle iPhone app with the lights out. Painful, even when you reverse the display.

Now that the folks at Amazon have bought Stanza, maybe they'll use that for their Kindle app.

The only complaint I had with Stanza is that by default it switches portrait and landscape modes automatically, but thanks to the "Lock Book Rotation" setting, you can turn that off. I like to read in portrait mode, and I'd forever be accidentally turning the iPod a bit and it'd go off into landscape. Finally found the setting so I have no gripes.

If I had a quibble, it'd be that a WiFi connection is required to send documents from the PC to the iPod. But that's the way it is with the other document reader apps too. It'd be nice to just be able to do the transfer with the iPod sync cable plugged in, but I don't think Apple allows any app to communicate that way.

I love that Stanza's built-in catalogs yield up so much free content. So many books can be downloaded for free. I'd never read any Jane Austen until on a whim browsed into Stanza's link to Project Gutenberg. Working on "Mansfield Park" now.

Lauren

I agree completely with your assessment of the Stanza (pluses and minuses) with only one exception:


Actually, you can do that if you use the iPhone Explorer app. (I don't recall whether that was free or not; if there was a cost, it was minimal.) Once you set up and configure iPhone Explorer, you need only plug your iPod into your computer and then drag and drop the files you wish to transfer.

cheers,
Lynn