Stanza updated; Kindle doesn’t suck?

So yesterday, Stanza for iPhone received a rather significant update, which was rather surprising to me. I say it’s surprising, because Amazon (the makers of the Kindle and the Kindle DX and formerly a rather large competitor to the Stanza application) purchased Lexcycle, the makers of Stanza, back in April of this year. Since that time, Stanza has seen no major update and it was unknown if Amazon would even be supporting the application any further, instead focusing their efforts on improving the Kindle app for the iPhone.

Well, yesterday we got our answer. In its first major update since its inception, Stanza has been completely overhauled. After spending a little time with it, I was able to determine that nothing appears to be broken so far, and the app shows the same great features and attention to detail as it always has, with some slick new interface designs.

But that wasn’t enough for me, as I decided yesterday to add the Kindle app back to my iPhone to see what had changed since I had last used it. Turns out, quite a lot. For example, my biggest complaint in the early builds of Kindle for iPhone was that you had to slide your finger across the screen to turn the page, which could be rather frustrating in long-term usage. I was happy to see that was no longer necessary. A simple tap on the left or right of the screen turns the page, just like in Stanza. I even found a large number of free books to sync to my device so that I can test out the app in the future and see if it will work as one of my top 3 methods for reading books (the other two methods being Stanza and good, old-fashioned paper bound and held in my hands).

I will say this, however. One feature the Kindle app has that really beats out Stanza, is the ability to store any books that you buy online and resync them at any time. While I have a large collection of books available to Stanza thanks to Calibre and the Stanza app for the Mac, should something happen to the data on my computer, I would lose them all. Not so with Amazon and the Kindle store. Perhaps one day they will integrate the two apps into one and I can store books from other ebook stores online and sync to the Kindle/Stanza super-hybrid.

It’s worth wishing for.