iPad2: alternative to Stanza?

[f0dder]

Okay, so I'm pretty pissed off right now.

I upgraded my iPad to iOS5 a couple of days ago, and boy was that a craptastic experience - dismal download speeds... yeah sure, lots of people hitting Apple's servers at the time, but they're trying to position themselves as a cloud provider and can't handle it? Not to mention that the crapTunes downloader doesn't know how to resume downloads... like, wut, it's 2011?.

Anyway, I digress - yesterday I realized that Stanza no longer works, throwing Sig6 and Sig11 errors. What, an OS update on easy-to-support fixed-capability hardware that breaks backwards compatibility of a regular usermode application? "Apple - suddenly everything sucks!". Then I realize that Stanza probably won't be updated, since Amazon bought Lexcycle probably pretty much just to kill off Stanza. Ugh.

And of course there's no way to downgrade to the previous iOS version - I thought the backup I made before installing iOS5 would allow that, but I guess that's a silly expectation when you're dealing with crApple. Not even if you find a 4.whatever firmware image from their own servers - you need a jailbroken device for that. Like, wtf?

This leaves me with, what? iBooks is a bit of a joke. Too much time has been spent on making it "cute", like the bookcase UI metaphor and the super-animated page transitions. But it's slow, and requires the use of crapTunes to transfers ebooks over from my collection. Ugh.

Stanza had a bunch of features going for it, where the important ones I'm looking for in a new reader are:

• Calibre integration, so I can simply grab the ebooks from a Calibre instance running on my workstation.
• Fast no-nonsense page flipping.
• Compact list of available eBooks (cover art and title, perhaps possibility to sort by author or title).

I came about Ouiivo eReader, but it's unstable, can only show the first page of search results from a Calibre server, et cetera.

[wraith808]

I don't know of an alternative, but at least I know not to upgrade.  I also use eReader, but I see that it's gone... if you ever downloaded it, you might try to recover it, because it supports most if not all of the formats stanza did, and has a minimal interface.

UPDATE: I just realized that I hadn't opened stanza on my new phone- I get the same problems unfortunately.

Some threads on the support forum (no answers of course):
http://getsatisfacti...for_the_iphone_ios_5
http://getsatisfacti..._unhandled_exception

One of them recommends readMe, which I hadn't heard of... I'm happy with eReader (though it doesn't support o'reilly like stanza did, so that's a bummer), but I might check this one out too.

[nosh]

Don't know any alternatives, I only use iBooks (since Calibre converts text to epub) but it's become progressively slower with iOS upgrades [insert conspiracy theory here], which is a shame. Rolling back the OS on a JB device comes with its own set of problems, since a lot of apps don't have backward compatibility.

BTW, are you using an iPad 2? It would really suck if iBooks was slow on there too!

(I'm waiting for an untethered JB before I go near iOS 5 - Pic somewhat related  )

[Paul Keith]

Don't have an Ipad but the only thing I could find is the Kindle software although obviously it doesn't sync with Calibre.

[f0dder]

BTW, are you using an iPad 2? It would really suck if iBooks was slow on there too!

-nosh (October 17, 2011, 10:35 PM)

Yup - pageturn on PDFs is almost as slow as a Kindle screen refresh... that's NOT good. I can live with iBooks not being perfect, I guess, but...

...having to go through iTunes to get stuff on the iPad really sucks, I'm not putting that p.o.s on my workstation - and Calibre+eBooks is on the workstation, not the laptop where I've begrudgingly installed iTunes. THE killer feature of Stanza was definitely that it could connect (wireless, of course) to Calibre on my workstation, and transfer books that way. (That it's faster and it's UI is in many ways better than iBooks was a pleasant bonus).

The Really Big Feature of iOS5, the iCloud, is pretty much useless. Yeah sure, wireless backup of the iPad is fine and all, and the sync between iDevices is probably nice as well. But it doesn't offer you any easier access to your files, no new way to get data onto or out of the iDevice, etc. It's just another of those crApple black boxes.

[nosh]

For PDFs I use GoodReader, which is pretty awesome feature-wise. You can sync using Dropbox, there's even a "Local Servers (via wifi)" option there, dunno exactly how it works though - I transfer files via SCP (jailbreak perk). I can't really speak for its speed, since I have nothing to compare it to... I read 20-40 MB magazines (full graphics) there and am quite happy with it.

[wraith808]

Stanza has been updated, and I can confirm that it again works in iOS5.  There was apparently a problem with the library, so that could be an issue.

[Renegade]

So, has the update insanity settled down enough for someone that always waits because he doesn't like farting around with software updates that break things?

-- Haven't updated to iOS 5 for that exact reason -- stuff breaks.

Is it safe enough now?

[wraith808]

So, has the update insanity settled down enough for someone that always waits because he doesn't like farting around with software updates that break things?

-- Haven't updated to iOS 5 for that exact reason -- stuff breaks.

Is it safe enough now?

-Renegade (November 11, 2011, 12:20 AM)

*I* haven't updated my iPad.  I only have iOS5 because I got an iPhone 4S (out of need this early- my prior phone got wet)

[f0dder]

Stanza has been updated, and I can confirm that it again works in iOS5.  There was apparently a problem with the library, so that could be an issue.

-wraith808 (November 10, 2011, 08:36 PM)

Wonderful - back to having a sane method of transferring PDFs to my iPad(*) . I seriously thought Amazon had killed off Stanza for good.

(*) well, technically, pulling them from Calibre, using Stanza using my iPad.

[wraith808]

The biggest issue I have is that I got most of my books I read in stanza from somewhere other than an organized store, so most of them didn't have the book information.  I entered all of them at varying times over a year.  I was almost done!

...and now I'm back to square one... 

[f0dder]

I have the metadata pretty well nailed down in Calibre, and it shows just fine when I use Stanza to browse the booklist from Calibre... but it seems like Calibre only keeps the metadata in it's own database files, and doesn't update the PDF files. Very good default choice (lots of DIEDIEDIE to applications that touch my files without asking), but I'd like an option(*) to update the PDFs - because once in Stanza, some of them have reeeeeally cruddy metadata

(*): option might be hiding somewhere right under my nose :-)