One of my primary goals with the iPad was reducing the amount of paper clutter in my house. As a voracious reader, my home library was quickly approaching the need for a Dewey decimal system. While Andy Ihnatko is known for living a year of digital media last year, for a while now I’ve been trying to reach that goal myself.

The good news is, the iPad makes it very easy to purchase and consume digital media. I’ve had no eye strain issues with the iPad, having read over 10 books on it since its launch. Neither have I found the weight of the device to be a big issue — however I usually keep it propped on something. Reading outdoors is a problem with the glare, though, and there’s no way I’d want to bring my iPad to a beach.

The bad news is, there’s really not one app that’s perfect — especially if you have non-DRM e-books you also want to read in the same app with DRM’d content. Because each store’s content ranges from fantastic to abysmal, it can also be hard to find a single-stop app. However, if you are of the mind to strip the DRM yourself from books you’ve legally obtained, it is possible to get them all into iBooks.

So, here’s how I found each app to hold up. While many of these apps also have iPhone versions, for this article I’m going to be focusing on the iPad.

iBooks

iBooks is Apple’s e-reader. It can read books purchased from the iBookstore, as well as non-DRMd epub-formatted books and PDFs. I found the app to be visually pleasing, and little touches like the page turning animation heightened my enjoyment of reading on the app — it’s trivial, I know, but the little touches add up. iBooks also keeps the PDF and e-books on separate bookshelves, which I found easy to find content with instead of hunting through a large selection.

I did find the PDF reader to be slightly wonky, though. I did an initial sync of about 20 PDFs, but the first time I used the “open with” feature in iOS to open a PDF, it removed all the existing PDFs, leaving just the imported document. I also had the app crash reading a PDF, and that also removed all the PDFs, with the extra bonus of also removing all the e-books on the subsequent sync — and let me tell you, getting all the books back in was a hassle, requiring an app reinstall, and multiple syncs and a lot of four-letter words. Clearly, iBooks 1.1 has that “rushed out the door” taste.

Version 1.1 introduces the ability to add notes (only to epub files; not PDFs) and these, as well as your position, sync to iBooks on the iPhone.

iBooks is also the only one of the apps I found that allows you to manually change the order of how books appear on your bookshelf. I found this handy for arranging a queue of sorts for the order I wanted to read books. You can also get very granular in iTunes for how you categorize the books, and iBooks will let you sort  on them. While reinstalling the app and/or books will preserve your location in the book, the book’s place on your bookshelf is not. So, after that lost e-books saga I just talked about, I had to go in and re-order my shelf again.

While Apple claims that “5 of the 6 world’s largest publishers” are on the iBookstore, that missing one is Random House, which is the largest publisher. Therefore, the iBookstore selection is weaker than Apple would have you believe. Also, you can only view iBookstore from within the iBooks app.

Kindle

Amazon’s Kindle app is a very pain-free reading experience on the iPad, especially if you’re an existing user of the hardware Kindle. After signing into your Kindle account on the app, you’ll be able to download all your purchased books. It won’t grab them all on initial launch; you’ll need to go into Archived Books to download them.

While you cannot side-load your own e-books, and adding content will require your iPad to be connected to the Internet, Amazon’s Kindle store is first-class. I had a tremendous success rate finding books.

Like iBooks, Kindle also allows for annotating, but here’s where I feel the Kindle infrastructure really shines. While you are locked into the Kindle infrastructure from a DRM standpoint, the Kindle app is available on iOS, Mac, PC, Android, and Blackberry, So you’re not locked into a hardware and software combination like you are with iBooks.

Barnes and Noble

Barnes and Noble is late to the e-book party — its Nook reader came out late last year. That said, the app does a few nice things: in addition to adding notes and bookmarks, you can also Google or look up on Wikipedia highlighted text.

The app is very customizable. It ships with a few themes. Instead of the garish themes you might find on a skinning site, these are all very readable. If you don’t see a viewing selection you like, you can make your own within the app.

I found the bookstore selection to be very good — on par with Amazon’s. As with Amazon, you can also get readers for various platforms. You will need to have the iPad connected to the Internet to put books on it, but you can view the bookstore on the web. If you are a Barnes and Noble member, you will not get an additional discount on e-books like you can with a paper book.

Stanza

Stanza is an interesting little e-book reader. It’s very side-loadable; it’s the only app that will let you “open with” both e-books and PDFs. By default it will connect to a handful of e-bookstores, and you can also read DRM’d content from ereader.com on it. As with iBooks, you can annotate non-PDF books. You can also use the file-sharing feature within iTunes to transfer content, too.

If you’re not already a customer of one of the large e-bookstores, Stanza is a very appealing app. I love how you can just throw books at it from a variety of sources without any problems. I did find the library view to be wanting, though. The type was a little large for my tastes, and while I could change the thumbnail sizes (or turn them off all-together), I couldn’t see where to adjust the font size.

Zinio

Zinio is more of an e-magazine reader than an e-book reader. I’m mentioning it here because magazines are a large part of my media consumption. At first, the Zinio app got off a rough start. Every time you turned a page, it would take a while to for the page to finish loading. That’s gotten better, though, and page views are almost immediate. While there are viewers out for the Mac, PC, and iOS, Apple’s censorship arm also reaches to the Zinio platform — some titles are not available on the iPad, even though far more explicit material is available in the iBookstore.

I’ve found the selection to be merely OK. You can read MacUser and Macworld UK, as well as Macworld U.S. National Geographic also looks amazing on it. Of my regular reading choices, only Macworld and National Geographic are available via Zinio. The various writing magazines I read are not.

I did find the subscription prices to be very enticing. I grabbed a subscription to Esquire for only $8.

Wrapping Up

Until iBooks started its crash festival, it was my favorite for reading. However, since the bulk of my purchases come from Amazon, and the Kindle app has never, ever, crashed and lost my books, I’m going to be using that app more often. Amazon is also the leader for content, with iBookstore coming in at a distant third. Maybe it’s my reading tastes, but a search of books I was interested in yielded less than a 10 percent success rate. Also, while I love Apple and all, I’m more willing to invest in a reading infrastructure that supports the widest variety of platforms.

What is nice to see is the iPad does deliver on the promise of virtual reading.

What about you? What iPad reading app do you prefer?

Before I say anything else, it’s my duty to report that Apple is indeed acting within the scope of the agreement it has with developers in requesting the removal of this feature from apps. As of now, USB syncing is still a private API, which means developers shouldn’t technically be using it. To get around this, many have implemented the feature using the iPhone’s Digital Camera Image Management folder, but that also requires the use of private APIs.

Whether or not developers are violating the development agreement isn’t at issue here, though, really. Apple has quietly acquiesced to the use of USB syncing in many apps, not just Stanza, until now. The timing is not inauspicious. Apple’s only begun to enforce this rule following the unveiling of the iPad, and, more to the point, of the iBookstore.

Ars Technica believes this is only a temporary measure. They point to an alternative apparently in the works in iPhone 3.2:

Though users of Stanza, PDF readers, numerous audio editors and sequencers, and other apps will be frustrated, the good news is that Apple has a mechanism planned to address both syncing and file sharing issues. The beta SDK for iPhone OS 3.2 has APIs for accessing an on-device shared storage folder, which will be mounted as a readable and writable disk when plugged in to a computer via USB.

Ars then goes on to point out that iPhone OS 3.2 is currently only intended for use with the iPad. The same features could later appear in an update for the iPhone, but they may not. We could see an OS forking at this point, and that might mean a significant difference in the available features for each device.

Not to mention that there’s no guarantee the iPhone or the iPad will ever get the same kind of USB syncing functionality back. The iBookstore means that Apple has a monetary reason to prevent other content providers from getting its e-book products onto its devices. And in the meantime, while everyone waits for a potential future solution, Stanza users and others are left completely out in the cold.

The iPad represents many new possibilities for iPhone developers, but at what cost? Will Apple close its iPhone OS platform even further to ensure that it maintains the lion’s share of content control? Will it quietly hamstring legitimate competitors as it extends its power over the media users view on its devices? Not necessarily, but with the advent of a brand new device, we should watch closely to make sure we aren’t losing something irreplaceable in the bargain.

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Now clicking “Get Books” in the Kindle iPhone app will take you to a shopping site nicely optimized for Mobile Safari, so you don’t have to squint and swipe around just to give Amazon your money. It definitely improves the user experience of book shopping, but I think that compared with some other iPhone-optimized site designs based on similar concepts (i.e., deviantArt‘s mobile site), they could still make further improvements to make the experience even more pleasant. Why not take a cue from the company you just acquired and build an integrated catalog browser into your app? Stanza will probably be keen to help you out, now that you own them.

Kindle for iPhone is the top e-book app in the U.S. store, having overtaken longtime leader Stanza prior to their purchase of the much smaller company. It’s still unclear what their specific aims were in acquiring Stanza, since they’ve yet to either offer Kindle content in the app, or give Kindle for iPhone users access to the titles they may have in their Stanza library. One thing is clear, though — Amazon is serious about the iPhone platform, even though they offer a competing device. Looks like they want their cake, and they want to eat it, too. We’ll see how that works out for them.

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Who’s that knockin’ at your door? Why it’s none other than the freshest pickings from the App Store, joined by a smattering of Apple news.

Before we get stuck in to this week’s iPhone picks and recommendations from the App Store, let’s shift our focus for a moment and have a quick recap on what went down this week.

There’s so much to get through here, so let’s kick off by rewinding back to Monday where Apple launched a new iPhone OS 3.0 beta, sliding in a selection of new features including settings for push notification and audio scrubbing in the iPod app. Plus, David Appleyard took a look at iStat for iPhone. The $1.99 app is a useful tool for remotely monitoring your system performance and resources.

The very next day, Amazon swallowed up iPhone developer Lexcycle. A significant purchase indeed because Lexcycle is the brains behind Stanza, a wonderful — and absolutely free — eBook reader for the iPhone. Also on Tuesday, our own Clayton Lai continued his Jailbreak series, looking at how to jazz up the sedate iPhone lock screen.

Rumors abound as Verizon CEO Lowell McAdams has apparently, “talked to people at Apple.” Speculation has turned to the possibility of two new Apple products: an “iPhone Lite,” and apparently a “media pad.” The latter of which would essentially be an oversized iPod Touch.

The latest addition to TheAppleBlog’s journalistic lineup, Gavin Bowman, launched the App Store Roundtable article series. His first post brings several developers together to look at the growth of the App Store and the initial gold rush. And finally, Apple stealthily launched Live Chat support for MobileMe. (It’s still not going to convince me to move over from DropBox, though.)

And in other news, UK-based artist Jon Burgerman has teamed up with UsTwo, the app developers behind Steppin and MouthOff. The team are currently cooking up an iPhone music toy, titled Inkstrumentals, featuring a crowd of Burgerman’s odd and awesome characters.

Moving on to the picks, this week I’ve been looking at Pixel Contact, Wolfenstein 3D Lite, MusicNeon and Lilt Line.

Pixel Contact (99 cents)
Since purchasing my iPhone, I’ve been disturbingly fastidious when it comes to keeping my Address Book tidy. It’s particularly important to me that I have an image for every single one of my contacts. The problem is that when swapping contact details, it can be somewhat awkward to ask someone I’ve just met if I can take their photo. Can give the wrong impression, you see? This app allays an awkwardness by providing an array of pixellated people that you can assign to your Address Book contacts. It’s super cute and incredibly useful, too.

Wolfenstein 3D Classic Lite (FREE)
The original PC-based Wolfenstein was, I’m proud to say, my first FPS. The seemingly massive environments, the strange new control scheme, stealing weapons from dead enemies — it was a fresh and exciting challenge, something I’d never experienced before and, crucial for me as a young lad, it felt like games had started to grow up. Doom would, of course, take all of this even further for me, but until then, Wolfenstein reigned supreme. The iPhone version hit the App Store a couple of months back for only $1.99; those looking to try before they buy, download this free version and try out three levels.

MusicNeon (FREE)
Burgerman’s forthcoming Inkstruments toy for iPhone got me on the hunt for music games in the App Store. After searching for something fun but also free, I tracked down MusicNeon. Coming from the collective mind of Shanghi Gokei, an app development outfit from Japan, MusicNeon is a nonsensical sound toy meets Bejewelled-esque puzzle game. As the clock counts down, it’s your job to link the glowing neon tubes up from left to right, ensuring you trigger the seemingly useless bonuses along the way. The gorgeous glowing visual style, paired with the jaunty music selection (including a few Christmas classic, for no apparent reason) make this a tongue-in-cheek but nevertheless fun game.

Lilt Line ($2.99)
However, fans of music games looking for some serious action should perhaps skip the weird Japanese oddity that is MusicNeon and skip straight to Lilt Line. The game combines a deliciously messy Dubstep soundtrack — courtesy of London-based crew 16bit — with retro high-speed shoot-em-up action (except without the shooting). As a white line glides through empty neon caverns, you play by tilting the iPhone left and right and tapping the screen to the shuffling groove. Developer Different Touch describes the game as, “hack’n'slash dubstep vehicle synthesis simulation action.” Whatever it’s meant to be, it’s one of the most original games to hit the App Store so far and is highly recommended.

That’s all the picks we’ve got time for this week. Meet me right here, same time, same place, next week for more of the week’s news alongside fresh picks from the App Store.

In the meantime, what apps have you been using this week?

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People who like to read books on their iPhones (including myself) will be pleased to hear that Amazon has grown tired of playing catch-up with Stanza on the platform and instead bought out the much smaller company behind the app, Lexcycle. The Stanza makers are reportedly “very excited” by the development, which is understandable considering the gobs of cash Amazon no doubt threw their way. I’d be jazzed, too.

While it looks like the Stanza devs will continue to work on the app under the Amazon banner, and they claim that no major changes to the app will result from the purchase, Amazon no doubt has big plans for the platform, which it will likely integrate with its existing iPhone app for Kindle titles. Hopefully they don’t just shut it down in favor of their own app, or rebrand it, because I think the Stanza name at this point has become a force to be reckoned with in the world of iPhone apps.

This is definitely a smart play for Amazon, no matter what route they choose to take. They’ve seen how successful the iPhone has been as an eBook reader, and they, like us, have no doubt seen the growing rumors that point towards a larger, tablet-type device coming out of Cupertino in the near future. Even though it’s unlikely that such a device will be marketed primarily as an eBook reader, if it runs iPhone OS and therefore supports app store programs, users will want to use it as one, regardless of whether or not it has e-ink capabilities. In other words, they’ve seen the writing on the wall, and they’ve obviously decided that if you can’t beat ‘em, it’s best to acquire a company already in that space and join ‘em. Good choice, Amazon.

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The giveaway represents a long-term marketing strategy, not a one-off promotion. According to Neelan Choksi, Lexcycle CEO:

“We are thrilled to bring Stanza readers a sampling of the wealth of titles published by the Random House Publishing Group imprints. But this is just the tip of the iceberg: we look forward to extending this promotion to make even more free titles available.”

Presumably, Choksi and Lexcycle are hoping that the move by Random House will result in other major publishing houses following suit. Penguin Books currently offers an iPhone application, featuring book excerpts, podcast and blog postings, and critical essays. They eventually wish to offer full titles for sale through the app as well, but Stanza has far greater appeal and market penetration, so they may change their strategy based on the success of Random House’s campaign.

The free Random House title are currently available in a special category in Stanza’s iPhone/iPod touch Online Catalog.

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When it comes to eBook reading on the iPhone, Stanza is our app of choice. Best of all? It’s free.

With access to 10′s of thousands of books, it has a ridiculous selection of reading material and now that selection just got bigger. A lot bigger.

Fellow GigaOm site, jkOnTheRun, broke the news this morning about eBook mammoth, eReader now licensing their eBook technology for use on Stanza. This pushes Stanza’s selection of books up in the 100,000+ range.

With that sort of selection of books, you really should give Stanza a try.

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So how does it compare to Stanza? Would I recommend it? The answers, in my opinion, are that it doesn’t, and I wouldn’t. Not now, anyway. 

Classics primarily touts two things: special book cover art and a pseudo real-book page-turning experience. But the former could be more hindrance than help when you’ve got a lot of volumes, and the latter’s novelty wears off quickly, though it seems to be the primary reason Classics has received a lot of praise. 

Classics

The books’ cover art, sitting on virtual “shelves”, are lovely. And since there are only 12 they present no problems scrolling through them. But if you get 50 or so on this thing it’s likely to be an awkward list. Too bad we don’t know how quickly we’ll get that many, since it’s not under our control. Currently it’s a dozen, and we have to wait for more. I believe content should be a lot higher priority than that. 

When reading, the Classics page is quite nice. A very light beige background with dark brown text. It looks great. And yet I have to see the menu at the top of the page all the time. Why? Further, I have to see the iPhone’s info bar above that. Why? 

It’s kind of hard to get immersed in reading when you’re staring at two menus that painfully remind you you’re not in any kind of book. It’s also an issue because the screen is small, so why waste space showing items that aren’t necessary? 

I’d talk about the rest of Classics’ features, but it doesn’t have any. You can drag the books in the order you want (again, that’ll be a lot of fun when you have 50 of them) but that’s about it. No control over how the page looks or any other visual aspect of the program.

And no searching! How could they leave this out in an ereader? When you’re in Classics, forget about finding that quote you’re looking for. 

In short, version 1.0 of Classics is a one-trick pony consisting of a really cool page-turning interface. 

Stanza

Stanza lets you download public domain content directly to the iPhone. There are magazines, high school text books, Feedbooks.com content, and more.

But the biggest source is that you have all of Project Gutenberg to choose from. That’s 25,000+ books! You can browse these by several categories, such as author or subject, or even by popularity as shown below. Clearly, unlike Classics, content is front and center with Stanza. 

And so is the reading experience. You have the option to hide everything so the entire screen is the book page. You also have full control over what the page looks like. The font, leading, margin, size, background and font colors are all customizable. See below for the same page above in Stanza.

As you can see, I’ve chosen a background similar to what Classics uses, though I prefer my font closer to black than brown. Without a menu bar and the iPhone’s info bar, I do get immersed in reading. When you need to navigate via a table of contents, or get back home, or search, etc., just tap and the menus come up. 

As for page turning, Stanza doesn’t have Classics’ cool animation, but it has a couple of options to go back and forth. I prefer page swiping (like Classics), which uses a slide animation. While the slide may not be as cool as Classics, its duration is configurable and I get a very nice “turning” experience. You can use left and right taps instead of swiping if you prefer.

Aside from the nearly limitless customization and thousands of books to choose from, Stanza also has much better navigation through your library:

• Scrolling List by Title (with or without book cover art) 
• List by Author
• List by Subject
• Cover Flow view of book covers
• You can create your own “libraries” and add books there. For example, I have one called “Sherlock Holmes” with all nine volumes in it. 

When your library gets up to 50+ books, the above will make it a lot easier to find and organize it than a shelf that can only show nine books at a time. 

Oh, and Stanza allows you to search through your book, highlighting each found occurrence.

On top of all this, Stanza is free. 

There is no question my major gripes with Classics can be added later as enhancements, and we’ll see if the developers do so. Still, some of them are obvious enough I wonder why they’re not there now. If the developers provide a lot of content (from which I can choose), and better navigation, and searching, and control over the page, then they’ll have… Stanza. OK, not really, but it will be better able to compete. 

As it is, my impression of Classics is that it’s a really good page-turning animation with a minimal book reader and content wrapped around it.

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