I’ve read a lot of books by Steven Brust, mostly his Vlad Taltos series.  I stumbled across his website at some point when I was in the midst of serious Firefly withdrawal, after having just finished watching all the TV episodes and then Serenity for a capper.  I had been searching for more Firefly stories to gobble up, and had found the graphic novels on Amazon (which seem to rock so far!) and found out that Steven Brust had written a novel in the Firefly universe.

I contacted Steven to see about making a free iPhone app version of his book, and he said to go for it.  I started by looking around for any open source ebook readers I could use as a base.  The best one seemed to be iphonetextreader, but like all the others I could find, it was made back before the SDK was available and used a bunch of unsupported API calls.  I downloaded it and tried to strip out all the unofficial calls, but it wasn’t looking good.

Time to start over.  What was I trying to do?  Get the book onto the iPhone.  Stanza is a free ebook reader on the iPhone, but their catalogs of ebooks aren’t open for adding new items.  Yes, you can find a somewhat hidden place to download from a URL, but typing in a URL by hand, and from memory (no copy & paste on the iPhone), um, blows.

But hey!  Stanza, having been made by some smart folks, has a protocol handler for doing direct downloads!  All you need to do is make a stanza:// link to a “.epub” version of the book and it will fire up Stanza (assuming you click the link on your iPhone) and install it!  Sweet!  It took a few tries to get a reasonable looking epub version (I didn’t much like calibre, Stanza Desktop did alright for conversion) and that was it.

So that’s the punchline, click here if you are on an iPhone and have Stanza installed, and enjoy some Firefly goodness.  Steven will have it up on his website soon, too.