The Writer in Black

The Writer in Black

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Need a new e-reader

I just updated the OS on my iPod Touch (what I use as my primary e-reader as well as for other things).  Unfortunately the OS upgrade broke the e-reader app.

I had been using Stanza a free e-reader that worked great for my needs.  Now, it crashes whenever I try to open it.  As I understand it, Stanza is no longer supported so unless some further upgrade of the Apple OS revives it, I'm out of luck with continuing to use Stanza.

That means I need a new e-reader app.  The things I liked about Stanza:

- The ease with which I could scroll through my rather large library to find a particular book.
- The easy navigation through the e-books.
- The "two tap" (center of the screen to open the controls then the yin-yang symbol) switching between "day" mode (black text on a white background) and "night" mode (white text on a black background).
- Convenient note-taking/annotation
- Oh, and it was free. ;)

One of the things I used the e-reader for is proofreading/editing stories.  Once I finished a story I'd convert it to epub and put it on my iPod.  A lot of errors and problems that I missed when writing on the computer jumped out at me when I read them on the iPod.  I could use the annotation feature to write notes about changes/fixes and then refer to them when I worked on the master story file on the computer.

Another use to which I put it is keeping a fairly large library of reference information:  things like historical and mythological writings (the Norse eddas and sagas, Apollodorus' writings, the Baghavad Gita, the Book of Arda Viraf, many other things).  This allows me to do background research for stories and worlds conveniently wherever I happen to be.

So now I need a new e-reader to replace the one that's broken.

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