As a subway commuter, I've long been a fan of reading on a PDA held in one hand while dangling from a bar with the other: It beats wrestling with a broadsheet any day. My habit started years ago with a PalmPilot and continues today on my iPhone. I'm not alone in this: Reports show that the iPhone is actually a more popular e-book reader than the Amazon Kindle, thanks to free apps like Lexcycle's impressive Stanza, which has been installed on thousands of iPhones. Given its ability to display many types of files and format them however you want, Stanza is the best e-book reader for the iPhone, and my favorite.

Stanza's main Library page offers three sections of menu choices. The top ones let you view your collection by Titles, Authors, Subjects, and Latest reads. The middle area is concerned with how you get books: Online Catalog, Shared Books, and Recent Downloads. The Online Catalog choice is where you find books from a good selection of e-book sources, including Fictionwise, Random House Free Library, Feedbooks, Munseys.com, the Gutenberg Project, and Book Glutton. All except Fictionwise offer only free, public-domain titles rather than current bestsellers. At the bottom of the main Library page, you can add your own collection categories.

I downloaded Caught Stealing, by Charlie Huston, from Fictionwise, which took just over a minute over AT&T's EDGE network. Over Wi-Fi, Voltaire's Candide took a mere 3 seconds. (There's no syncing by cable.) The cover art was included in the download, and if you hold your finger on a book's cover art, you can add it to your photo album. RSS feeds from magazines and newspapers are also available. The RSS option is a bit flaky, though. I got an error when trying to download The Economist, and The New York Times opinion pages yielded only the first paragraphs of each article. But you get a nice "Update this feed" option after you choose a feed from your library. The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells, is included with the app if you want to try reading immediately.

Ironically, the only way to buy current books for Stanza is to use Fictionwise, the site that owns competitor eReader. Books there tend to the pricey: A Dan Brown novel goes for $7.99; David Sedaris's When You Are Engulfed in Flames is $19.99; and Stephen King's The Shining costs a mind-boggling $35! On the Kindle, by comparison, most e-books of current bestsellers cost just $9.99. Even classics seem overpriced in the Fictionwise store, but at least the selection is wide enough to make it likely that you'll find that popular book you're looking for—over 40,000 are available.

To buy, you need to create an account and enter credit card info. You can go through the whole process on the phone, but it's easier at the stanza.fictionwise.com site. After setting up an account on the Web, purchasing via the phone becomes easier. But whichever method I tried, the books I purchased didn't appear in my bookshelf until a few minutes later. In fact, with the first couple of books I bought it took so long that I thought the transaction had failed. Another minor annoyance I discovered in my testing: You can't use the same account to buy books for both Stanza and eReader. You need a separate account for each.

Stanza does a good job of taking advantage of the iPhone's touch screen. There are two ways to turn pages: You can swipe your finger from right to left, or in the opposite direction to go back a page; or you can just tap the right-hand side of the screen to go ahead or the left-hand side to go back. eReader offers swiping only, and tapping can be easier when you have just one free hand. When you turn a page, an animated page edge curls over (an effect you can turn off). I actually prefer the way Classics (a competing iPhone app) curls the page, slower or faster depending on how you move your finger. But although Classics presents its titles beautifully, its selection is much more limited than Stanza's.

Like most of the competing software, Stanza is smart enough to remember where you were in your book, but its handling of the process isn't ideal. When you restart the app, instead of opening your book at the last page you were reading—which is how it works in eReader—Stanza displays your bookshelf before taking you to your place.

You tap the center of the Stanza screen to show menus at the bottom for chapters, settings, and search. Settings let you choose from scores of text and background colors, as well as 21 font styles (though several of these display with the standard Roman font, as the iPhone's fonts are pretty limited). In addition, you can use sliders to set the font size, font spacing, and margin width. eReader, by contrast, offers just choices like small, medium, and large.

I do, however, miss the eReader reverse text icon, which toggles the display between white text on a black background and the opposite. You can do this in Stanza, but it involves several steps, as opposed to the touch of an icon. Stanza lets you hide the phone-service status that takes up a band along the top of the screen, but eReader does this automatically, which is what you want. Both apps let you set text justification to Left, for ragged right edge. I prefer this view because it prevents the program from stretching words to fit a justified view.

Searching worked fine in my testing, and you can create your own bookmarks by hitting the Chapters icon, choosing a plus sign, and giving the bookmark a name, which will appear above the chapter entries. eReader actually handles bookmarks more slickly: You just tap the upper right-hand corner and the page appears dog-eared. Another eReader exclusive is its dictionary capability, but you have to buy that separately, and setting it up is a bit of a bother.—Next: From Desktop to iPhone