STEVEN GOODHEART  OK, as I said in my review, I think the features in Stanza are good enough to pay for -- but at the Stanza site, it says the iPhone version is free, and I'll be darned if I can see where to pay for the Desktop version, and I've looked all over the site.

I saw a Stanza blog that said that Amazon bought them out recently..maybe that's why there's nothing to buy yet? Or maybe Amazon is going to offer this free to everyone, with perhaps the Kindle Reader in mind? Just speculating, but for now, as far as I can tell, Stanza desktop is as free as the iPhone Stanza, which makes Stanza, with all it's great feature,s an incredibly good deal in my book.  
(Version 1.0b18)

STEVEN GOODHEART  There must have been a lot of improvements in this since June -- I'm pretty impressed with this version.

It's lightning fast on my machine (Snow Leopard on a Core 2 Duo iMac) and has worked without a glitch so far. Of course, I immediately loaded up the great (free) Tofu to do a comparison, and I have to say, Stanza not only does what Tofu does, it adds a whole lot of functionality that Tofu doesn't have, the coolest being bookmarks. Bookmarks are very well implemented and really easy to set and use.

With Stanza, you can not only set the background color, as in Tofu's prefs, you can also set and create themes for font and background color and layouts. Stanza allows you to have 6 different kids of layouts -- horizontal scrolling (like a ticker tape!), two, three, or four columns, vertical scrolling narrow (1 endless single narrow newspaper-like column), and vertical scrolling wide (wide column (size of windwow) full screen scrolling. Of course, there's full-screen with any layout you choose, as well.

I haven't mentioned all the cool features, but even at this beta stage, it's worth $15 to me, the free Tofu not withstanding, because using Stanza with PDFs or whatever is a very, very pleasant visual experience, and bookmarks make it a must have for a researcher like me.   
(Version 1.0b17)

XPLICIT  This is ... I don't know, maybe I shouldn't say ... ok I do it, it's crap. Slow, buggy, sharing doesn't work and it's ugly. About: "Beta Version - expires Mar, 13 2009". Oh really?

Who would develop such a thing? At least nothing is charged for this. But 15 bucks for the final? Dear developers, you'll have to do much, much, MUCH! better than this.  
(Version 1.0b16)

JOSHEWAH  I would like to see manual editing of metadata, and maybe an overall editing mode so we can clean up formatting a bit. Sometimes the line breaks mess up kindle format too and it makes it hard to read on the device. I also wish it could do chm, which from what I have seen is just html files bundled into a container

Other than that this app is quite handy and is the only one on OSX to export to kindle format since we don't have mobipocket creator.  
(Version 1.0b13)

AIKOUSHA  To the one question... this is somewhat like tofu. They both use the same methodology to display text. However, this is an e-book reader, tofu is not. Tofu handles only basic text documents and some pdfs.

This is a unique little application, but it is far from being complete:

1. It doesn't handle .chm or .pdb e-book formats (and might not handle others I couldn't get my hands on), it opens them without complaint, but all you get is ascii hash.

2. So far it only recognizes the very simplest of chapter headers and ends up crashing some other text together in odd ways, making it difficult to read and sometimes hard to differentiate parts and story flow. Either better auto-recognition should be used, or a set of options to recognize certain features.

3. It sometimes blows the formatting rather badly... though I don't know if this is due to misinterpretation of the text or the multi-column display process.

4. It's far from complete when formatting .pdf files. One file I opened it was missing large chunks of text and all but one image, and it couldn't handle almost all the formatting. This made it very difficult to read since numbers were appearing in the text that didn't belong, and pieces of text were out of the correct positions and not displayed correctly.

5. As far as X/HTML is concerned, it can't even handle the most basic formatting (italic, bold, links, etc.) and that's just the start.

6. The "Themes" function has major bugs, at the moment I cannot get it out of a black or dark background, and the set background color doesn't work at all.

One main test I do with all software is Unicode compatability... unfortunately I could not locate a Unicode formatted e-book to download, so I was unable to test this... so can it display kanji or arabic, or sideways text? I have no idea.

Though I would never use it, since there are too many hijacked crappy e-books out there already, this apparently also has an export feature, which might prove useful in book reviews where capturing quotes is necessary. However, since many of the listed formats cannot be read by the program at the moment, I question it's ability to actually export any of these accurately or at all.

Though this is a very good start for something that everybody has been screwing Mac owners over for the last several years, it has a long way to go. In it's current form, I wouldn't pay even $2 for it, let alone $15. I certainly wouldn't use it to read e-books until it handles almost all of the formatting problems (I can use 4 different programs that do this right, and are free, at least for most e-book formats). And most intelligent publishers use .pdf for manuals and textbooks, so the system handles that just fine with "Preview."

As far as stability, I didn't spend too much time testing it on that, but nothing I threw at it destabilized it in any way, and I did have quite a number of windows open at one point. Though I suspect, it's easy to make things crash-proof, if you make sure everything being input is converted to plain ASCII or preformatted .jpgs.  
(Version 1.0b11)

GAZMAN  This is a great app for getting ebooks onto your iPhone. The iPhone version of stanza is free and has a nice interface. One feature I would like to see is the ability to invert the screen and font colours in the iPhone app, e.g. white text on black screen.  
(Version 1.0b8)