Using RetroRead
with
Stanza for iPhone and iPad
Although Google provides a reader for the iPhone and iPad that enables you to search and read Google books from your Apple mobile device, you can't save the books for reading offline — you need to be connected to the Google site while reading. And meanwhile, although the free Stanza reader can read epubs (Google's native format) — if you try and simply download one from books.google.com, the iPhone/iPad Safari browser will complain that it can't download an epub file!
However, the free Stanza reader (available in the App Store) has cleverly registered itself as a protocol handler for the "epub://" protocol for links. This means that if the download link starts with "epub://" instead of "http://", Safari will launch the Stanza reader, and the epub will be inserted into the Stanza library. This is the easy, obvious, and intuitive way to get epubs into your Stanza reader — that is, to download them from the web!
Since the uploaded epub files are archived along with the mobi editions created for your Kindle, any book available for the Kindle in the RetroRead library, is now also available for the iPhone or iPad. If you access RetroRead from your mobile device Safari browser, the "epub://" protocol string will be rendered in the download links, and the epub flavors of the books will be served rather than the Kindle mobi format. If you have the free Stanza reader installed, you will be launched into Stanza and your epub will download.
So regardless of whether you have one or both of these industry leading readers, you can readily access the huge library of Google epubs. And if a book you want isn't in the library, you simply have to upload it to RetroRead, and you will be not only making it available for yourself, but for others.