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
Instapaper Pro
Spare your thumb and forefinger all that pinching and zooming by taking advantage of Instapaper’s iPhone-friendly formatting of Web pages.
On first glance, Instapaper might seem like an underpowered online bookmarking service. But closer inspection quickly reveals an indispensable tool for anyone who enjoys reading long articles online.
Instapaper’s utility is found in its dedication to simplicity, and in its flawless reformatting of Web text for the iPhone’s smaller screen. It works like this: After signing up for an account at instapaper.com, you click a provided bookmarklet in your Web browser to save the current Web page for later reading. Instapaper then strips everything but text from the Web page, optimizing the column width and text size for the iPhone. It’s impossible to fully understand how wonderful this is until you’ve spent some time waiting for a 400KB graphic to load over Edge in Mobile Safari during a long commute.
Adjustable font sizes and a choice of text and background colors complement the default formatting. Articles can be emailed or opened in Mobile Safari, and an optional tilt control allows you to scroll by leaning your touch to one side. Although we prefer saving articles through a desktop Web browser, the bookmarklet works well enough in Mobile Safari.
A more limited free version of the app offers the same saving and recall but removes the font options and tilt scrolling. The website offers access to your saved articles through your desktop Web browser and is almost always open in one of our tabs.
Developer: Marco Arment
www.instapaper.com
Price: $9.99
Document Format: Web pages
Netnews Wire 
Books and other long-form writing aren’t the only quality reading opportunities on the Web. For weblogs and other periodicals, RSS feeds remain the most efficient and convenient format—especially if you follow a lot of different sites. NetNewsWire’s iPhone app brings much of its desktop RSS reader’s convenience to the iPhone, as well as robust syncing between the iPhone, Mac, and PC.
For users already using the desktop version, the iPhone app immediately syncs with your existing account at Newsgator.com, downloading all unread items in your existing feeds. Items viewed in the iPhone app are marked read in the desktop app when the latter syncs, and vice versa. Important items are easily saved for later retrieval in your account’s Clippings folder, though the contents of the folder are only accessible from the desktop application.
The app’s usefulness and ease are largely provided by what it leaves out. The advanced features found in the desktop application—flagging items, organizing feeds into folders, etc—are ignored in favor of reliable reading and simple navigation. It’s very much intended to supplement the desktop app rather than supplant it. Overall, it’s smart philosophy, though we do wish for a way to easily add feeds found in Mobile Safari to our NetNewsWire collection.
Developer: Newsgator
www.newsgator.com
Price: Free
Document Format: RSS
To turn on desktop document editing, connect your iPhone and your computer to the same wireless network, and click the tree icon within the iPhone app. As of this writing, the shared connection isn’t password protected, and you’ll see a warning to this effect. Next, launch Safari on your desktop machine, click bookmarks, and select the Bonjour collection. Inside, you’ll find WriteRoom listed. Double-click its entry. The next page will allow you to add and edit WriteRoom’s file collection on the iPhone.
Within the phone app, adjustable font sizes and background colors make reading and writing more comfortable. In the end, though, the app’s most refreshing feature is its most basic: Landscape orientation is supported for both reading and editing files—a feature surprisingly absent from Apple’s built-in Notes application.
Developer: Hogbay Software
www.hogbaysoftware.com
Price: $4.99
Document Format: Plain text
Flashlight 
It never hurts to have a light handy, whether you’re finishing a paperback or finding your way through the living room after sneaking in late.
For touch or iPhone owners who don’t like reading long-form text on screens of any kind, we recommend Flashlight. The application white washes your screen to reveal its full brilliance, transforming the world’s most sophisticated mobile communications device into the world’s most expensive booklight.
Developer: John Haney Software
www.johnhaney.com/flashlight
Price: Free
Document Format: Paper
Don’t Worry, The Older Kids Can Play Too 
Despite our focus on the iPhone and iPod touch, traditional scrollwheel iPods can take advantage of e-books too—although in a more limited fashion—thanks to the Notes feature. To enable Notes on your iPod, select its entry in iTunes, and check the box next to “Enable disk use.” Click Sync, and your iPod will appear as a disk on your desktop. Files copied to the Notes folder within that disk will appear on your iPod under Extras > Notes.
Before you start copying text files, bear in mind that iPod Notes carry two important restrictions. First, the files must be in plain text format (also called ASCII text). Second, the files must be no larger than 4KB. Book-length files can easily break several hundred KB, so reading larger works will require dividing the original file into many smaller files.
Sites such as manybooks.net offer downloads preformatted as iPod Notes. Alternatively, you can convert existing plain text or rich text files at eBookhound (ebookhound.com). Upload the file you’d like to convert to Notes format, and eBookhound will break it into 4KB segments, preserving the paragraphs and other formatting as much as possible. The finished product is a ZIP file you can download to your desktop. To enjoy the converted file on your iPod, extract and copy the enclosed folder to your iPod’s Notes folder, and read the numbered files in sequential order.
Illuminating Downloads
Get your read on with these free e-book repositories and lit sources.
Project Gutenberg
gutenberg.org
More than 25,000 copyright-free books, including everything they made you read in high school and college. Touch-friendly formats include plain text and html.
Feedbooks
feedbooks.com
Feedbooks doesn’t offer as many titles as Project Gutenberg, but it does offer better organization, a greater selection of contemporary titles, and a wider range of format choices. The entire catalog is built into Stanza.
Manybooks.net
manybooks.net
The site features most of Project Gutenberg’s content but offers it in a much wider variety of file formats, including PDFs formatted specifically for the touch screen and traditional iPod Notes.
Cory Doctorow’s Craphound
craphound.com
Copyright-reform activist and writer Cory Doctorow has been putting all of his books online in a variety of DRM-free formats for years, and his website offers them all. Those curious about the practice would do well to download his latest book, Content, a collection of essays about copyright and the Web.
Tor.com
tor.com
Science fiction and fantasy readers will appreciate the free short stories found here and the touch-friendly Web design.
Give Me Something to Read
givemesomethingtoread.com
Instapaper developer Marco Arment stocks this site with some of the more popular articles saved by Instapaper’s users. Subject matter varies, but the reliable selection of timely long-form writing does not.
