walter said:
>   Stanza on the iPhone is great. Especially in combination with Feedbook,
>   which provides proper formatting for many Gutenberg etexts.

stanza is ok.  and feedbook is very good.

but something about these sentences still rubs me the wrong way.

i think it's the notion that "proper formatting" can be defined well.
(to that end, perhaps you'd like to give us your definition, walter.)

or perhaps it's the feeling that you probably haven't yet examined
enough feedbook e-books to gauge its quality with much accuracy.

or maybe it's the knowledge that feedbooks has likely cherrypicked
the easiest books to format, and left the difficult ones for a later day.

at any rate, i would encourage you to spend the mere $10 and buy
the iphone app "eucalyptus", which pulls from the entire (english)
project gutenberg catalog, and provides nice formatting (defined as
"it looks nice", which implies that it is "proper" formatting as well),
while using the plain-text files obtained _directly_ from p.g. itself.

(feedbooks starts with p.g. files, but massages them to put them
into its proprietary database.  which is probably why it has only
done about 15% of the project gutenberg catalog, at my last check.)

***

andrew said:
>   I was impressed with Stanza when I saw that it appears to use utf-8

really?  that's all it takes to "impress" you, is the use of utf8?
you're not too hard to please...

-bowerbird