Like Amazon’s Kindle web app from last August, the Kobo web app is really a website that can store data on your device even when you’re offline. This means you can download and read ebooks without a live connection. It also means Kobo can offer it to (for example) iPad and iPhone users directly, instead of having to request Apple’s permission first.

But unlike Amazon’s Kindle web app, the interface is designed to benefit Kobo more than its customers, by reserving about two thirds of the screen for Kobo’s own use. The difference is striking when you look at the two web apps side by side, so let’s do just that:

The green parts that I’ve marked indicate the “store” section of the interface.

On the Kindle web app, it’s all about creating a user experience that emphasizes reading — it’s all about your ebooks, your library. You’re in control of what you see each time you open the web app. And when you’re ready to shop, you tap the button and the entire interface switches to the Kindle Store. Amazon’s approach is more sensible, because if you’re a customer/reader, your primary need when you open an ereader app is to read; shopping for more ebooks is important, but secondary.

It’s true that there are lots of ereader apps that can fulfill that primary reading need, but unfortunately for the vast majority of us, each retailer’s DRM/format scheme prevents us from straying beyond their custom apps. We’re stuck with the app that the retailer provides — and that means if you’re a Kobo customer, more likely than not you’ll be reading your ebooks “within” Kobo’s store.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a new path for Kobo. Here are side by side comparisons of the current App Store apps for Kobo and Kindle:

Again, green indicates the “store” section; again, Kobo claims the majority of the interface for itself, leaving you just one third of the screen to browse your own library.

I don’t know why Kobo keeps doing this, other than I suspect the company is aggressively trying to boost sales. By contrast, I imagine Amazon enjoys strong enough sales that it can afford to hand over the full interface to its customers. But I also suspect that Amazon intentionally keeps the private library and public store concepts separate in order to provide a more intimate experience for its customers.

With this and my last critique of Kobo, it’s starting to look like I really don’t like the eternal third place runner in the ebook retailer race. That’s not true! I just don’t like it when a business pushes too far into its customers’ personal spheres, and that line is very easy to cross when we’re in the digital world. No matter how “e” publishing becomes, a quality reading experience is still essentially a private experience — a silent connection between the reader and the author that takes place in the inner world of the mind. I wish Kobo would take that concept more seriously.

This is probably a good time to remind you of a competitor, Kinstant, that offers a similar service. Kinstant’s page—also displayed via the browser—offers links as well as weather. The weather portion is nowhere near as fancy as what Kindle Weather Station offers, but on the other hand you can add your own custom links and access dozens of commonly used websites. Based simply on sheer value offered, I’d currently recommend Kinstant over Kindle Weather Station.

And finally, Kindle Weather Station also offers a free way to access the service from your Kindle’s home screen. Instead of opening up the browser and selecting a bookmark, you can download the sample of a special ebook from Amazon that will let you jump straight over to the Kindle Weather Station service in the browser. While this counts as a solution, you should know that it’s ridiculously easy to create a “Quick Links” document that you can customize as much as you want, and that can include as many bookmarks as you like instead of just one.

Update: Forget all of this! Stanza delivered a surprise update to the Apple app store on November 10th, 2011, that restored functionality on iOS 5. But only update if you need to: this latest version breaks the app if you’re running an older iOS like 4.3 (thanks to Paula for pointing that out in the comments below.)

Lexcycle’s Stanza, the once mighty ebook reader app for iOS devices, doesn’t work on Apple’s latest mobile operating system iOS 5, and as development and maintenance on the app appears to have stopped, it likely never will.

Eulogy

Stanza was my first and most favorite ebook app for the iPhone, and later the iPad. When it was first launched, it had better features than any competing third party app, and over time it consistently beat the big players like Amazon, Kobo and Barnes & Noble on things like openness and customization. I loved Stanza for subway rides—I used a giant font size in landscape view and was able to flick through screens like index cards, which made it easy to keep my place while being jostled and interrupted constantly.

For a while, Stanza was my catch-all app for ebook files, and it let me standardize my library around the EPUB format despite Amazon’s anti-user push for azw/mobi and tpz. Whether it was a title I’d downloaded from an author’s website, or a classic I’d grabbed off of Project Gutenberg, Stanza could handle it. I stopped caring that Amazon and Barnes & Noble were taking baby steps with their branded apps, because the scrappy alternative was far better. Worst case scenario, I could always remove the DRM on books from those retailers and shift them over to Stanza.

But best of all was how Stanza worked with my Calibre ebook library. I exported my entire Calibre library using OPDS and uploaded it to a private server, then connected to it from Stanza over the Internet. I was able to browse my library—and instantly download titles to my app—from anywhere I could get a wireless connection.

I always knew that Stanza would eventually go away after Amazon acquired it back in 2009. Frankly, I was pleasantly surprised the retailer kept Stanza available for as long as it did, although I suspect Amazon’s motive was purely strategic: it prevented Apple, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo from acquiring what was for a while the iOS platform’s most famous and popular ebook app, while at the same time it gave Amazon a way to indirectly offer an EPUB reader without having to sully the Kindle brand.

I suppose, if you want to live in denial, you can imagine there’s a slim chance Stanza will wake up from its comatose state one day and start working again. But it’s time to move on. From the day Amazon purchased Stanza, we knew in our hearts that it wouldn’t last forever.

We, the survivors

If you’re a Stanza user on an iOS device, what’s next for you? Here are some quick tips:

Getting your files back from a broken Stanza

The simplest strategy is to not upgrade to iOS 5 if you can help it, although by doing so you’ll miss out on some really nice features that Apple has introduced, like system-wide text expander shortcuts, an elegant (but extremely limited) to-do app, and the ability to update and sync your device over Wi-Fi.

If you updated your device already, and you have ebook files in your Stanza app that you really want to salvage before moving on, you can try using the Stanza Book Restore tool that Lexcycle created. It’s a Java app that will scan your most recent iTunes backup, find the Stanza files that were saved there, and extract them as files with human-readable names.

Finding a decent alternative

Based on the suggestions in this Get Satisfaction thread on Stanza’s iOS 5 issues and this Mobileread wiki page on ebook software, I tried a few other apps to see if I could find one that would work with my private OPDS library and provide some decent functionality. Here are my observations.

Best premium bet: MegaReader ($1.99 at time of post)

Pros:
• handles OPDS catalogs nicely
• good basic customization options
• some great built in catalogs, so if you just want to find a good book to read fast (from a public domain collection, naturally), you can do that within seconds of launching this app

Cons:
• doesn’t handle some basic font styles like bold or italic
• no way to take notes or look up words
• limited layout options (what is has are nice, but there aren’t many)

Based on the suggestions users are making on the app’s user forums, there are some other missing features that could limit its usefulness to some users: there’s no way to drag and drop files into it using iTunes, and it can’t handle really large (1000+ titles) libraries.

I’ve been using it for a few days, and I’ve found that for basic reading and public domain book discovery, I’m pretty happy with it. However, if I’m doing a closer reading of a book—which often includes taking notes, highlighting passages, making lots of bookmarks, and looking up unfamiliar words—I much prefer to use iBooks or the Kindle app.

Best free bet: iBooks

Pros:
• free
• simple but elegant UI
• handles PDF files as well

Cons:
• not many customization features
• no access to catalogs–only the terrible iBooks Store, which you should avoid at all cost unless you like having your ebooks locked to iOS devices and nothing else (not Mac desktops)
• I’ve had trouble with the app running sluggishly if I add a lot of notes and highlights to a text.

To get EPUB files from other online catalogs into iBooks, you’ll have to access them from Mobile Safari, then choose iBooks when you download the file. Alternately, you can drag-and-drop non-DRMed files into the Books section of iTunes and sync that way. Fine, it’s not a great solution, but it’s free.

Not recommended (except perhaps for public library checkouts):

Bluefire is more or less useless to me. Its choice of catalogs is paltry and locked down, meaning you can’t add your own, and its key functionality—the ability to read titles locked to your Adobe Digital Editions account—is duplicated in other apps. You can annotate your books, but you can’t export any notes, which makes the feature rather pointless.

Overdrive is only good for accessing library ebooks and audiobooks, and it doesn’t offer basics like layout options, the ability to annotate, or a dictionary. If you use the Kindle app, and your library has the title in the Kindle format, you’ll find it’s a much better option—Amazon will back up your notes so you can access them later, and you can take advantage of the Kindle platform’s bookmark syncing.

(Image credits: casket, wickenden; frame, John Loo)

I’m sure it’s more complicated than I understand, but right now it sounds a lot like the type of page and asset caching that Opera uses (used?) for its mobile browser, or that some cable companies use to reduce download times for customers.

Since Amazon Silk essentially routes all of your web browsing on the Fire through Amazon’s servers, it also raises a significant privacy question, but so far today I haven’t seen many mainstream media types address that. After all the dorky excitement over consumer technology dies down, I imagine we’ll start seeing headlines like “Do you trust Amazon with your web browsing?” and “Amazon Silk lets Bezos watch your every move”.

Update: The Amazon Silk Terms and Conditions agreement mentions that you might have the option to turn off the Amazon server caching and browse the web as you normally would, but since the word “generally” pops up several times in that section, I don’t think Amazon is making any legally enforceable guarantee to absolute privacy. (And that’s if you can turn off the Silk functionality on the Kindle Fire at all—there’s some confusing wording in the Terms that suggests the Silk browser may be on a “computer” instead of the Fire tablet when this feature is offered.)

Take a hypothetical monkey attack, for example. That phrase shown above more or less reads, “A monkey bit me,” which I imagine is a valuable phrase to know when you’re in a foreign land and find yourself beset upon by a monkey. (I think the kanji in the middle is actually an emoticon representing the self-satisfied monkey.)

Thanks to SeattleFlyerGuy, you can now visit kindlefish.com on your Kindle to quickly translate short phrases into over 50 other languages. The service uses Babelfish Google Translate, and you can save three default language choices for easier access when you revisit the page later.

What I like most about it, other than that it’s free, is that the translated text is displayed at a giant font size, so it’s easy to hold up your Kindle and point to what you’re trying to communicate. This is important if you’re suffering from multiple monkey-inflicted wounds, because you’ll need to get your message across quickly, even if the doctor has bad eyesight.

Of course, it also works on other devices as well, if you just want to take advantage of the stripped-down interface without going through the Kindle.

kindlefish.com

(Image: SeattleFlyerGuy)

“Kindle Twitter client round up” [The Digital Reader]

(Photo: nada abdalla)

Both companies have been rolling out or announcing new versions of their reading apps over the past several days. First, Amazon promised that it plans to release Kindle apps for future Android and Windows tablets that come to market (this week is the annual Consumer Electronics Show, where such devices usually first appear). Then it announced a new app for Windows Phone 7 at www.amazon.com/kindleforwindowsphone.

Barnes & Noble counter-released an announcement that it’s now offering a Nook Kids app for free on the iPad. Actually, the app was released on December 23rd, but I suppose B&N wants to get in on the CES coverage as well.

If you’ve got kids, the iPad Nook Kids app is a perfectly fine replacement for owning an actual Nook Color. It pretty much replicates the bookseller’s custom read-along titles exactly–and it’s a vast improvement over anything iBooks is offering right now. (Although version 1.0.0 seems to have a bug where it crashes if wireless is turned off.)

The original instructions at mobiputing.com explain the app and show several routes for getting the library book on your device.

The modified instructions at libraryjournal.com explain how to use your email account to move the appropriate file from your PC to your iThing.

Sadly, the Kindle still won’t play nice with OverDrive files and isn’t likely to change in the near future, which is probably its single biggest shortcoming compared to other devices. (The Kobo, nook, and Sony Readers all support library lending!) In other words, Bluefire won’t solve the Kindle/library problem, but at least it’s a useful solution for bookworms who happen to have iPhones and/or iPads.

[via Teleread]

So far we’ve got access to the Amazon Kindle ecosystem on the iPhone and iPod Touch, Windows PCs, Blackberry devices, and naturally Kindles. Next up appears to be devices running Android, the operating system Google developed mainly for smartphones, although other types of gadgets are starting to make use of it too.

The biggest impact will be on phones. If Android gets a Kindle app, then owners of phones like the Droid, the Nexus One, and the original G1 may eventually be able to buy and read Kindle books.

Beyond that, though, are a small but growing number of devices that use Android. The Entourage eDGe, a combo E-ink/LCD dual-screen tablet, uses Android to power the LCD side of things; currently it uses a proprietary bookstore, but it’s possible that in the future an eDGe owner could buy ebooks from Amazon as well. Dell’s new iPod Touch competitor, the Mini 5 (or maybe it’s called the Streak?) uses Android and has confirmed that it will have a Kindle app.

As a side note, the Nook ereader from Barnes & Noble also uses Android to power its mini-nav color LCD section, but somehow I doubt that any Nook owners will be seeing an Amazon Kindle store any time soon.

The main question now, especially for Android smartphone owners, is when will this version be released? Unfortunately even the rumor sites don’t have that information yet, although Dell’s Mini 5 is likely to go on sale within the next 2-6 months.

“Leaked Dell Streak flyer shows multitude of color options, confirmed specifications” [Engadget]