Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 12 years and 5 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

One of the first apps I put on my iPhone 3GS was Stanza, to replace iSilo from my Treo for reading e-books. At that time, Amazon had just acquired Lexcycle and I remember wondering they would end up combining the Kindle and Stanza apps. Well, now we know the answer: nope. A recent update to the Stanza iOS app (version 3.2) added iOS 5 compatibility, but effectively killed the app on iOS 4.x. It just crashes immediately.

As of this writing, the only way to get Stanza to run on iOS 4.x is to find the old version 3.1 IPA file on your PC (hopefully still in your Recycle Bin or a recent iTunes backup) and re-install it, possibly losing your books, annotations, etc. in the process (I did, anyway). If you do this, you’ll always see an available update for Stanza in the App Store which means you won’t be able to use the “update all” link anymore to download updates for all of your apps at once. Instead you’ll need to download them one at a time, which is more than a minor annoyance.

Frustrated by the unexpected death of one of my favorite apps, I started looking for a possible replacement and found MegaReader. It costs $1.99 (Stanza was free) and doesn’t have all of the features Stanza did, but it’s pretty close. The most important feature (for me) was OPDS support, which allows me to download the books in my Calibre library into the app. It’s very close to Stanza in the look-and-feel, navigation, and overall reading experience.

Some of the missing features I hope are added in the future:

• bulk downloading from online libraries (like Calibre)
• support for additional file formats (MegaReader currently cannot open PDF files)
• full-text searching in a book
• hide the iOS status bar when reading
• custom bookmarks (currently the only bookmark available is the last place you left off reading)

I’d also like to see cross-device synchronization of bookmarks (maybe via Dropbox?), but even Stanza didn’t have that.

I just finished the last few chapters of “Zero Day” using MegaReader (I had obviously started it in Stanza) so I haven’t used it a lot yet, but so far am satisfied with my purchase. After I complete a full book using the new app I may have more to say about it.