I am happy to announce the release of Stanza 3 to the iTunes App Store. Among many other improvements, this release brings a native optimized version for the Apple iPad!

Other Stanza 3.0 improvements include:

• PDF, DjVu, and Comic Book Archive support
• Turkish & Bulgarian translations
• Many, many bug fixes

In addition, the following new features are available for devices running iPhoneOS 3.2 and higher (currently, iPhone OS 3.2 is only available for the iPad):

In Stanza 2.1, we released a new experimental feature for Picture Books, and I just realized that we never actually communicated about this feature to anyone. Please note that this is only available for Stanza iPhone and iPod Touch, and not Stanza Desktop.

The key point to realize is that when Stanza is told that something is a picture book, it will ignore almost all other tags. So this feature only works with image only books.

To turn an ePub into a picture book, add the following element to the metadata section of the content.opf file:

One shortcoming of Stanza iPhone is that there is currently no good way to get books off of the device once they are on there. This is especially a problem when something goes wrong with the Apple update process when installing a new version of Stanza; if the update process goes awry, a user's entire library can get wiped out. This has been known to happen with especially large libraries.

The 6 books available for free in the Random House Catalog on Stanza iPhone/iPod Touch include:

• Full Moon Rising by Keri Arthur
• Changelings by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
• Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
• Templar Legacy by Steve Berry
• Starfist: First to Fight by David Sherman and Dan Cragg
• Demon Awakens by R. A. Salvatore

Random House and Lexcycle hope you enjoy these books and authors. These books are only available for a limited time so get them while you can.

There are handful of languages out there where the text is written right-to-left (RTL) where the writing starts on the right side of the page and finishes on the left. Stanza iPhone / iPod Touch doesn't officially support RTL as we haven't done enough testing on it but we are starting to get reports of Stanza working quite well with RTL languages e.g., Hebrew and Arabic.

I wanted to communicate some of the common book settings used by our RTL language readers:
Layout - Alignment = Right
Controls - Left Screen Tap = Next Page
Controls - Right Screen Tap = Previous Page

Stanza has been selected by O'Reilly Media as a Best iPhone App, and is featured in O'Reilly’s upcoming book, Best iPhone Apps: A Guide for Discriminating Downloaders, due to release in July, 2009.

We are very excited to announce that Lexcycle has been acquired by Amazon.com!

It has been an amazing experience to see Stanza grow out of our brainstormed ideas into one of the most downloaded iPhone applications. Throughout this period we have attempted to listen to and innovate for our customers to provide a great ebook reading experience.

Following her Orange Prize shortlisting, Bloomsbury Publishing is making Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows available as a FREE download (UK only) for 24 hours from 12 noon, Wednesday 22nd April via Stanza iPhone and iPod Touch users. UK iPhone and iPod Touch users can download Stanza at the iTunes App Store or from http://getstanza.lexcycle.com/.

To download Burnt Shadows simply open the Online Catalog from Stanza and tap the first item in the catalog. Hurry as this free giveaway ends at noon on April 23rd.

Lexcycle will be at the London Book Fair in Stand Y612 in the Digital Zone. Stop by and say hello or attend one of the 3 sessions where COO Neelan Choksi will be speaking:

• 19 April - 13:00 - 18:00 - Earls Court One, Level 1, Cromwell Room -
  Digital Conference: Strategies for Digital Publishing
• 20 April - 17:00 - 18:00 - Thames Room -
  Digital Publishing and the EPUB Standard
• 21 April - 12:15 - 12:45 - Digital Zone Theater -