Play word association with the average techie, and his response to the word “e-book” will probably be “Kindle,” Amazon’s best-of-breed electronic reader. To be fair, the Kindle’s paperlike display and long battery life inspire some serious gadget envy in us as well. But it’s not the only game in town. Properly outfitted, the iPod touch/iPhone platform makes for a killer electronic reader—and not just for e-books. Here, we’ve highlighted the platform’s ability to serve as a reader for documents of all sizes and types—be they simple text files, graphic-intensive PDFs, or your favorite novelist’s latest e-book.

Stanza

Stanza is the bus or train commuter’s dream app. Just make sure not to miss your stop.

Just as there’s no single source or file format for online documents, there’s no single app for all of your reading needs. That said, for those who don’t mind a little time spent downloading and configuring, the simple act of keeping your iPhone’s battery charged can ensure that you’ll never be without a good read again.

Stanza enjoys a reputation as the most popular e-book application for the iPhone and iPod touch, and its street cred is largely deserved. Reading books with Stanza is a genuine pleasure. Page widths are formatted for the touch’s unique dimensions, with appropriate default font sizes. Changing font size is a one-click operation from any page, and pages advance with a simple tap on the right side of the screen. The application integrates the book catalogue from Feedbooks.com, making thousands of free titles available for browsing and instant download. 

Download docs straight to your touch.

Unfortunately, getting books from the Web at large into Stanza usually requires the help of its sibling desktop application (available for both Mac & PC). On the Mac, the desktop app’s performance can be summarized with two words: nonnative code. By coding an app for easy porting between different platforms, developers sacrifice the system integration offered by coding for a single platform. In Windows, where OS integration is less of an issue, the app appears more at home, but it still lacks polish.

Looks aside, the desktop app can read and convert a huge range of file types—we never found an unrestricted file it couldn’t port to our iPod touch. Converting and transferring files is a multistep process, but it’s easily mastered with the given documentation. While Stanza technically supports the file formats favored by several commercial e-book readers, it doesn’t support files protected by DRM (digital rights management), so most commercial e-book stores are useless to the iPhone, including Amazon’s Kindle Store.

Catch up on your classes.

Stanza offers two alternatives to transferring books through the desktop app. First is the iPhone app’s ability to download books from a provided URL. Before you get too excited about this, understand that the URL must be manually entered. It’s doable but frustrating: URLs can’t benefit from the iPhone’s automatic error correction, and the location of the ePub file must be spelled out in full (including the “http://”).

The second alternative is using Mobile Safari to click on any ePub file URL that begins with “epub://” rather than “http://”. Clicking these specially formatted links will automatically download the given ePub file into Stanza. The trouble is that most of the ePub files we found out in the wild were linked with the much more common “http://” prefix, leaving us to either peck out the text of the URL or wait until we next launched the desktop app.

With all that said, Stanza is the application to have for those who still enjoy reading books. And might we suggest that your next commute is an excellent opportunity to get reacquainted with The Great Gatsby?

Lexcycle: www.lexcycle.com
Price: Free
Document Format: e-books (.epub)

Air Sharing

If you’ve ever wished for the desktop-like ability to save, browse, and read files on your touch, Air Sharing is the app you’ve been waiting for. Once connected to the same wireless network as your Mac or PC, the service makes a folder within your iPhone or iPod touch available as a standard network drive. A variety of file types-—including text files, rich text files, Word documents, and PDFs-—can then be saved to the iPhone and read within the application.

Air Sharing allows file browsing and viewing much like your computer’s desktop.

The app earns most of its points for making its shared folder easy to find and connect to. Click the Wi-Fi icon, and the app provides your phone’s Bonjour address and current IP address. On the Mac, connecting to the phone’s network folder is then as simple as pressing Command-K and entering one of the provided addresses. (Hint: use the Bonjour address if at all possible; unlike the IP address, it won’t change. Double hint: Windows users should be sure Bonjour is installed on their machines.) Password protection on the shared folder is optional and turned off by default.

Considerate instructions take the voodoo out of networking.

On the con side, the application displays text and html files with much wider columns than Stanza or Mobile Safari, which makes the text appear smaller. Zooming to a suitable size then requires horizontal scrolling. No font resizing is offered within the application, and the default font for plain text files is too small for sustained reading. Switching between portrait and landscape modes with a large file creates a considerable delay.

Documents formatted with relatively narrow columns and larger font sizes were most readable in Air Sharing, which offers no font controls of its own.

In our testing, the most readable files were PDFs formatted with narrow column widths and large font sizes. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that a future version will improve the reading experience for other file formats. Until then, Air Sharing is a great way to store important documents in a variety of file formats on your iPhone, whether for quick reference on the go or for later transfer to another machine. As portable storage, it’s cheaper and more reliable than Mobile Me’s iDisk and eliminates the hassle of carrying another thumb drive.

Developer: Avatron Software
www.avatron.com/products
Price: $6.99
Document Format: Plain text, rich text, PDF, Word documents, etc