I love Stanza. It’s not only a way to combine two of my favourite things–my iPhone and books–but also a way I can lie in bed and read that requires even less energy than holding open a book. The phone is smaller, lighter even than some paperbacks, I can see the whole screen without holding my arm up as I must to see both pages of an open book, and it doesn’t require as much light as reading print (P. complains about my 7w bulb, though I fully intend to ignore him until he can sleep without snoring, grinding his goddamned teeth and kicking me, which will never happen). Stanza also has a “night mode” with white text on a black background that’s really easy on my eyes in a darkened room, and “touch to turn the page” is even less effort than turning an actual, physical page. The book selection is good–even the free book selection is good if you like classiscs (and I do)–plus it can read various file formats. Amazon’s Kindle might use e-ink, which is supposed to be easier on the eyes than a backlit screen, but damn, that thing is ugly, plus it’s expensive ($350 just to read books?), and I already have an iPhone. Besides, I can’t stand the name…Kindle. Eeeuch!

I think I watched the movie American Psycho (at least most of it), and I have read the (dead tree) book, but it’s a favourite, so I also had it in PDF format. Don’t recall where I got it, but I had it. I was reminded of it last night as I was reading an article about Amazon removing ratings for books that involved homosexuality (and therefore removing them from any search that wasn’t specifically for the particular book). I could never read a whole book on-screen at my desk, and although I probably could at my laptop, it would be much more convenient to read it on the phone. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to get Stanza to “see” the PDF, and I wanted something that would remember my page (PDF on the iPhone won’t), so I checked the web site. They have a free desktop client that converts (whatever file format) to an ebook format, but of course they have only Win and Mac versions. I tried installing the Win version with Wine, but it choked on the Java installation. Not even for this would I boot to XP, so I went looking for a Linux-native solution and found Calibre. Calibre not only coverts to ebook formats, but it allows you to enter extra information, specify cover images, and runs as a server so you can download the ebooks over wifi from a local computer. I suppose I could have figured out how to use it in spite of the fact that the instructions I found said it’s “not too intuitive”, but since I had instructions, I used them, and I’ll put them here so I’ll remember…

Using Calibre (it’s not too intuitive I’m afraid)

• Install (get it here)
• Use “Add Books from multiple directories” to get it to load your existing eBook collection. Now, it’ll handle nearly all formats that I’m aware of, and will pull them all into 1 library. PDF’s, LITs and PCRs all mixed and treated the same; you’ll see how well this works now…
• Set your default output to EPUB (button in top right area). This is the standard that Stanza works best with
• Clean your library up:
  • Set up free ISBNdb.com and LibraryThing.com accounts. Calibre helps with this. It’s worth the minor effort; with these u get a very (the best I’ve seen) intelligent assistant to help you ID your book’s ISBN, and from there u can get the cover art
  • For each book, press E to edit metadata, then use button “Fetch metadata from server”. You will be given a list of likely matches to your book title and author. If not, you need to check the title and author in this same screen – they may have silly filename characters that need editing. You’ll figure it out easily enough
  • Once you have the metadata, click “Fetch cover image from server”. Select cover, and close with “OK”
  • Do for all books, and your books will be nicely completed with author, title, publisher, date, cover, and in most cases a synopsis (blurb)!
  • Consider adding tags; if you do this, they will appear as subjects in Stanza iPhone. Nice for separating fiction classes, non-fiction subjects, hobbies & interests, etc. Note that from the above metadata, stanza will automatically group authors so don’t tag them.
• Now you need to covert all your books: Select the lot, make sure you have chosen ‘EPUB’ as the output, and click “Bulk Convert” button. Just accept the box that comes up as blank. Now, here’s where calibre comes into it’s own; even tho you had mixed formats, you will end up with all books having both the original format, and the desired EPUB format, BUT your library will still look like a single list. Nice! Gone are the days of storing multiple directories for different devices.

Getting your books into Stanza:

• This is surprisingly easy. Do not try to open each book in Stanza desktop and then ‘share’ to your iPhone. Takes time, covers get lost, and some LIT files will not open. Rather:
• Use settings in Calibre (minute hammer button in top right area) to check the ‘Content Server’ is started
• Make sure your iPhone and PC are on the same WiFi network
• In Stanza iPhone, choose ‘Online Catalog’, then the ‘+’ button in bottom right
• Choose ‘Add Stanza Catalog’, and enter a name (eg My PC library) then
  http://192.168.1.2:8080/stanza
  The red text needs to be the IP of your PC on the wifi network. [add a link sometime on how to find this]
• Now download each book – 1×1 I’m afraid unless someone can suggest how to do this faster…
• That’s it; a complete library, nicely organised, on an awesome reading device. Forget Kindle, forget WindowsMobile’s head start.

I didn’t see Intrepid on the supported distributions, so at first, I tried the source install, but it gave me some Python error that I don’t remember. Then, I tried the binary install that’s supposed to be for Jaunty, and it worked fine.

It put its shortcut under “Office” in the menu, which I suppose is at least fairly logical. Now I need to go and find my other non-free ebooks that I’ve never got around to reading because they’re on my desktop and I hadn’t bothered to copy them to my laptop. Not right now, though; it’s time to get some work done!

Edit to note that converting one book I had in RTF format nommed the hell out of my CPU and took so effing long that I finally cancelled the job, but once I converted it to PDF with OO.o, it took only about a minute to convert to epub, so…note to self, convert RTF to PDF first! Yeah, yeah…I’m going to get to work now. 🙂