Treat vendors fairly, and use them for technical services when this makes sense. And here they are: Do not trust vendors on issues such as e-book formats or digital rights management or, in Stanza-style cases, even the ease of transferring files. Some lessons here for public and academic libraries and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)? Definitely. Apple stored the books in iTunes under cryptic file names, which the transfer software could miraculously unscramble. Most e-books lovers would have lacked the technical ability to do the transition-they probably wouldn't even have known of the rescue program. The original programmers behind Stanza had come up with a program to easily transfer books from iTunes to another part of my computer (link updated in May 2012-also see here and here), and I sent the files to my Dropbox folder, which is WiFi-accessible from just about all all my machines and will store books for all e-reading programs. Luckily I enjoyed a happy ending in this case. I'm baffled why Amazon bought Stanza and its developer, Lexcyle, except to kill this potential Kindle rival. The program rudely crashed after I upgraded my iPad. Profit over readers' needs and the permanence of books, right? It was in the grand tradition of Amazon's having earlier abandoned lockers where readers could store books in the Adobe PDF format. But Amazon apparently has decided to kill Stanza no update so far, at least. I had amassed zillions of ePub-format books for the program. Stanza software, one of my favorite ways to read e-books, is dead for those of us running IOS 5.0, the new operating system for the iPad, the iPhone,and iPod Touch machines. Further update: Miss Sanza? Try Marvin e-reader app. Stanza apparently won't work under iOS 6 despite early impressions to the contrary. After that? Who knows? Also see another update, from September 24, 2012. Update: Amazon has agreed to give us at least one more Stanza–it's at the App Store now.
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