Stanza Chalks Up another W

Every day I think of more reasons to love the Stanza reader on the iphone/ipod. It’s simple and convenient, and it’s packed full of free public domain books. But there is more to it.

Stanza provides the shots of “new information juice” my brain has come to crave, yet lets me stick to my knitting, or er, reading. So rather than my brain wandering off, I’m pulled along, then into the book, and get a good old-fashioned submersive book experience (you know, like when you are sitting on the metro and you miss your stop because the real universe has been completely replaced by the universe evoked by the text).

A pet theory: I think there is a chemical/hormonal reward the brain gets for receiving new information. Hence the “pleasure” when you get a letter in the mail, hence the need to answer the phone, hence the little shot of pleasure when you press renew to find a new email in the inbox, a new twit or ident; hence the jump from blog to blog, link to link, and one wikipedia page to the next. Our brains crave new information, and the web is designed to fulfill that need.

The brain starts to get conditioned to expect this chemical reward on a web-based time scale, every few minutes, or even seconds. It starts getting frantic when those chemical rewards don’t come. So reading long text gets harder. I notice my own concentration levels fraying as my years of network device usage increase. Books are harder to read than they used to be, it takes me longer to settle into actually reading, to focus.

But Stanza seems to fulfill both my cravings, my love of reading long text, and my addiction to new information.

Stanza’s got a small screen, compared to a traditional book, and you get to the end of the page quickly. Once you get there, a simple, pleasing animation brings you the next page. Info junkie craving sated, and the reading continues.

Now, I should say that Stanza can’t be the best game in town for long. It’s such a simple little app, and there will be plenty of other readers for handheld devices coming along. (That’s good for us readers).

But in the mean time, the people behind Stanza are making great moves. They just announced a partnership with Fictionwise, to offer 40,000 ebooks for sale, which follows on a less-exciting, but still promising, announcement that Stanza will provide excepts from PanMacmillian best-sellers. I do hope that’s just putting PanMac in position to offer their whole catalog. Bestseller excerpts on my iphone just aren’t good enough. But it’s encouraging.

And another worry is this: Stanza “has licensed Fictionwise’s eReader eBook reading format for integration with the Stanza iPhone application.”

I thought we learned that closed proprietary formats are bad for everyone? Ah well…

[via theDigitalist]