Dear Things Made Out Of Other Things,

I honestly hope this open letter finds you. I was going to write a review on the iTunes App Store, but I will likely paste this letter into the review field. It will be (as you can see, if you’re reading this on the App Store) a one-star review.

Stanza was my previous iPhone reader app. I did not use it very much because there was something vaguely niggling about the UI. I was kind of existentially dissatisfied for somewhat ineluctable reasons. Since I didn’t use it much, I didn’t have much of a point of comparison in the iPhone book reader app market. (What a goddamn boring phrase. Please kill me if I ever again write anything as boring as that phrase.) I saw Eucalyptus on some dumbass Apple blog. I read too many of them to keep track, so I can’t be sure which blog author to pillory. It’s a me-problem, not a you-problem. My pathology plays very little in the general tenor of my evaluation of Eucalyptus. Unfortunately, Stanza does.

See, Stanza is free. It offers books from the Project Guttenberg Library. It allows you to read epub books. It’s free. It is free. It costs nothing. The UI is not very pretty. But it’s free. Oh yeah, it also has copy/paste. And you can change the background and text. It’s free.

I read some very positive review of Eucalyptus at which point I saw it was priced $10. Holy shit! That’s a lot! Then I saw your tag line, “20,000 books. The price of a paperback.” I should never have trusted a tag line comprised of two sentence fragments and faulty logic. Stanza is free! Eucalyptus costs $10! Stanza has by my count four-times as many useful features as Eucalyptus. It costs infinitely less! How can you sleep at night?

I understand that being an app developer is hard, little-rewarding work. But it’s not my job to subsidize your ill-chosen career. I have a feeling that all the positive reviews of Eucalyptus are some sort of Emperor’s New Clothes thing where everyone feels like a fucking idiot for having spent $10 on something that Stanza does four-times better and for infinitely less money.

Please add the ability to copy/paste and read epubs and then I will feel approximately half as stupid. I will likely not use Eucalyptus, still, since I don’t like being made to feel stupid.

Signed,

B. Michael