Electronic Books On Your iPhone

School, the building, the halls, the passes, the time sheets is all over. The students, their iPods, their cell phones, their questions, their ideas, all finished - at least until September.

Everybody take a five. It's summertime! ...and the learning is more compact, more accessible and more convenient than ever. Today, learning is ultra portable and cell phones are the lightest and brightest gadgets in the class. Today's cell phones can take you around the world and beyond the stars.

Photo courtesy of phoneszoom.com

Last weekend while browsing through Wesley Fryer's blog I read how he was using Stanza, a free application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Stanza is a wireless electronic library for the iPhone which once installed on the iPhone or iPod Touch, allows you to download full length books, newspapers and blogs onto your mobile device and read your books anytime and anywhere you are. Downloads are sent directly to your iPhone or Pod in a matter of seconds. It's a breeze to search through the thousands of free and for-pay books. You just tap your finger on the screen, download and read.

Photo Courtesy of lexcycle.com

As I scrolled through the various eBook shops (BooksOnBoard, Fictionwise, O'Reily Ebooks, Feedbooks, Project Gutenberg, Random House and many more), I recognized that at least half of the classic literature being taught in high schools today was available for free to download.

Stanza's online catalog

Stanza's books by subject

The reading experience is very good. You can adjust the font size to fit your particular needs. The type looks as good, if not better than book or newspaper type. Choose from thousands of books with just the tap of your finger. What's really powerful is having access to your complete library anywhere and at anytime. You can even create your own documents on your computer and upload them to your phone and read them on Stanza.

Addendum

Ebooks and readers are starting to get a lot of attention from universities, school administrators and teachers around the world. Amazon's Kindle, Sony's Reader Digital Book Eucalyptus and InterRead's COOL-ER are just a few of the ways that readers can take their digital books, audio files and other paperless documents with them wherever they go.

Related articles

Will Richardson on Cloud Books

Wesley Fryer on Irrelevant Paper

Google Notebook listing of eBook and eReader resources


H Songhai
6/27/09