Stanza

» see lexcycle.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Stanza's entire life happened on a phone I did not own. The iPhone was in Turkey by 2008 but it was a device you saw rather than a device you had, and reading books on a three and a half inch screen was not something anyone I knew had decided was a good idea yet. So this is a grave for a piece of software whose reputation I only ever encountered secondhand, in the arguments people had afterward about what Amazon did to it.

Lexcycle put Stanza on the App Store in July 2008, in the first weeks the store existed. It came out of work by Marc Prud'hommeaux and it was free. Within a year it had passed four million downloads and was the ebook reader on the iPhone, at a moment when Amazon had a Kindle device and no Kindle app.

That gap is the entire reason this story has an ending. Amazon spent 2007 and 2008 treating the Kindle as a piece of hardware you bought. Stanza spent the same period demonstrating that a reader is software and the screen can be anything, including the phone already in your pocket. By early 2009 the reading app that mattered most on the most important new platform in computing belonged to a startup with no bookstore behind it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually did ~

Stanza read EPUB and eReader files. It also opened PDF and DjVu documents, along with comic book archives, which is to say it read whatever you threw at it rather than whatever a store wanted to sell you. It shipped with a browsable catalog wired into free sources, so a new user could open the app and start reading public domain books in under a minute with no account and no card on file.

There was a desktop companion for Mac and Windows that converted your own files and pushed them to the phone over wifi. That was the part that mattered to anyone who kept their own library. The whole design assumed the books were yours and the app was a viewer, which was the opposite of the assumption every store-owned reader was built on, and it is why people who used it in 2008 still bring it up almost twenty years later.

~ the actual end ~

Amazon acquired Lexcycle in April 2009. Lexcycle said publicly that no changes to Stanza were planned and that customers would keep buying from the same content partners. A month later the Kindle app for iPhone shipped. Nobody has ever produced a document proving intent, and nobody has needed to, because what followed was four years of an unmaintained app.

Stanza's last meaningful update landed in early 2011. Apple released iOS 5 in October of that year and Stanza broke on it, badly enough that Macworld ran a piece on the app being in limbo. There was no fix. In 2012 Amazon removed it from the app stores entirely, and lexcycle.com went to a dead link. No shutdown post, no migration path, no statement.

~ what got buried with it ~

The catalog is the loss. Stanza's front page pointed at free and independent sources by default, which meant the first thing a new reader saw was books nobody was selling. Every reading app that came after it opens on a store. That was not a technical necessity and it was not what users asked for. It is what happens when the app belongs to the shop.

The rest of it is the ordinary shape of an acquisition that was never about the product. Amazon bought the thing that was ahead of it, kept it alive long enough that removing it looked like maintenance rather than a decision, and then removed it. Readmill got the same treatment from Dropbox in 2014. The pattern is old enough now that the announcement language is close to standardized.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »