How to view PDF and other files on your iPhone and iPod Touch

This art­icle was ori­gin­ally writ­ten in April 2009. A few new apps have appeared since then, but one, GoodRead­er is now my daily go-to PDF read­er right now. I touch on a few of the new apps here, includ­ing GoodRead­er, but you’ll be back on this page if you want to check out Stanza — a…


This art­icle was ori­gin­ally writ­ten in April 2009. A few new apps have appeared since then, but one, GoodRead­er is now my daily go-to PDF read­er right now. I touch on a few of the new apps here, includ­ing GoodRead­er, but you’ll be back on this page if you want to check out Stanza — a great eBook reader.


I have to read a lot of fic­tion in the next few months. A lot of Sci­ence Fic­tion to be pre­cice, and it’s so I can cast an informed bal­lot to help select the best of the genre at this year’s World Sci­ence Fic­tion con­ven­tion (World­Con).

As a mem­ber of World­Con, a pack­et con­tain­ing this year’s nom­in­ees arrived in my inbox earli­er this week. Lots of PDF, RTF, DOC and TXT files, for many diverse cat­egor­ies includ­ing best Nov­el, Novella, etc. Not small files by any stretch.

So, to avoid cull­ing a small forest by print­ing it all out, I decided to try and read them on my iPod Touch. In the past I’ve enjoyed read­ing on my pre­vi­ous port­able device, the Palm T|X, so figured that I should give it a try on the Touch. And that got me won­der­ing, is there an iPhone or iPod Touch app to read pdfs? I’m happy to say the answer is yes, but.

The dilemma, how to get just under 200mb of data on to this little suck­er. Well, I solved it, two ways. Here’s how:

Over-the-air file shar­ing (Air Share) for PC with Files Lite:
Files Lite is, as the name sug­gests, the free ‘lite’ ver­sion of Oliv­eToast’s Files pro­gram.

The way it works is pretty simple.

Files allows you to store and view files on your iPhone or iPod touch. You can con­nect to Files from any Mac or PC and drag and drop files straight from the Find­er or Win­dows Explorer, as you would with any oth­er shared folder. In fact any cli­ent which under­stands the Web­DAV pro­tocol can con­nect to Files.

So, basic­ally your set­ting your iPhone up as a serv­er, then copy­ing files to/from it using your desktop com­puter­’s interface.

I’ve tried it, and it works quite well. But, where it really excels is in it’s abil­ity to dis­play those vari­ous file formats. I’m already part way through Little Broth­er
by Cory Doc­torow and am very com­fort­able read­ing on the iPod Touch. For the most part, Files Lite works as you expect a well-designed iPhone app to work.

Files Lite is lim­ited to stor­ing 200mb of data in your device. If you need more, then you’ll need to buy the full ver­sion at the AppStore.

Or, take a look at the next applic­a­tion, Stanza.

Stanza, the work­horse of eRead­ers for your iPhone
:

This just in (Apr. 27.09) Stanza was acquired by Amazon.com. Not sure what this’ll mean for the free eBook read­er, but it’ll be inter­est­ing, for sure. Maybe Amazon’s cata­logue will now be avail­able via Stanza as well as Kindle.

Stanza is a very inter­est­ing ebook read­ing applic­a­tion. For starters, it’s not only for read­ing con­tent you already own, you can pur­chase and down­load new con­tent into your online library.

Which means that Stan­za­’s aware of many dif­fer­ent online pub­lish­ers (and dif­fer­ing eBook formats) of both free and paid ebooks.

To make Stanza work with your own eBook lib­rary, you’ll need to down­load and install the appro­pri­ate Stanza desktop cli­ent (Mac, PC).

Depend­ing on your con­fig­ur­a­tion (iPhone or iPod Touch) you’ll need to make sure your desktop applic­a­tion and port­able ver­sions of Stanza can ‘see’ each oth­er. Here’s an excel­lent writeup on exactly how to do that.

One draw­back for me; to trans­fer your exist­ing lib­rary, you have to move one book at a time. You can­’t (at least as far as I could tell) move mul­tiple eBooks in one pass.

Read­ing on Stanza is pretty com­fort­able, and intu­it­ive; tap on the right side of the screen to turn the page, the centre to adjust your set­tings, the left to flip back a page. Drag up or down to adjust the screen brightness.

So, for me, Stanza is the eBook read­er of choice. It is clunky to get the con­tent into my iPod Touch, but once it’s there, the read­ing exper­i­ence is just a bit nicer.

Your mileage may vary. I’d be inter­ested in read­ing your exper­i­ences with eBook readers…or sug­gest­ing oth­ers for me to look at…I’m sure I haven’t seen them all for the iPhone yet.

Update Sept. 30, 2009: The nat­ive applic­a­tion for iPhone and iPod Touch was released yes­ter­day, and you can view (online and off) many of the file types men­tioned above. I ‘touch’ on it a bit more here, but if you’d rather jump right in, check it out over at Dropbox. 

Top photo courtesy David Sifry

Comments

26 responses to “How to view PDF and other files on your iPhone and iPod Touch”

  1. Damian Esteves Avatar

    Great post! I’m try­ing out Files lite and con­sid­er­ing the pur­chase of the full ver­sion to put tons of PDFs on my iPod Touch.

  2. Brad Grier Avatar

    Hi Dami­an, thanks for that.

    Do try out Stanza — I find that between the two of them you get the best options for read­ing PDFs. If one doesn‘t dis­play a PDF prop­erly or nicely format­ted, the oth­er usus­ally will.

  3. CPH Avatar
    CPH

    Is there a way to do this “over the cable?” When trav­el­ling I usu­ally have 3G access on my iPhone. I have docs to go so I can read and modi­fy any file I receive but work­ing on a large doc on the iPhone is cum­ber­some. I want to trans­fer the file to my lap top “over the cable” as there isn’t a wire­less net­work avail­able, then edit it, then trans­fer it back for email­ing on to the next per­son. If there was a wire­less net­work I’d just do everything on my PC. When teth­er­ing for the iPhone is avail­able without jail break­ing my prob­lem wil be solved but who knows when if ever that will happen.

    1. Brad Grier Avatar

      Great ques­tion! Unfor­tu­nately Apple has the iPhone pretty well locked down when it comes to extern­al file man­agers. Some­thing like i‑funbox may do the trick, but I’ve not tried it and can­’t vouch for it: http://www.i‑funbox.com

  4. Azri Avatar
    Azri

    tried files lite and drop­box. nice, although it would be per­fect if i did­n’t have to reach page 376 by flip­ping one page at a time. that’s pretty much a deal break­er for me.

    1. Brad Grier Avatar

      True, unfor­tu­nately PDF sup­port for long doc­u­ments on the iPhone is a bit lack­ing — it seems there’s some sort of polit­ic­al issue between Adobe and Apple re: iPhone Flash integ­ra­tion. Anoth­er app you can try is Stanza (http://www.lexcycle.com/), a free eBook read­er. It will address your con­cern about jump­ing to a spe­cif­ic page, but therea are some format­ting issues: http://bit.ly/6QPOM

  5. Ron Avatar
    Ron

    I did­n’t try but it must be pos­sible to con­vert files to epub, then view them on iphone with Stanza. To con­vert files one can use http://2epub.com or desktop software.

    1. Brad Grier Avatar

      Hi Ron,

      I think Stanza, the desktop ver­sion, allows you to save files as ePub format too. Thanks for that link though, worth try­ing out 🙂

  6. […] the life, Life­style Tech­no­logy, On the web, Reviews My iPod Touch is also my eBook read­er. I use the Stanza app (recently upgraded), and the Stanza desktop applic­a­tion to get pdf and oth­er formats into my […]

  7. Antonios Avatar
    Antonios

    yes but how do we put the epub files on the iphone after hav­ing con­ver­ted them?

  8. Brad Grier Avatar

    Hi Ant­o­nios,

    You need to run Stanza on your desktop com­puter. Then load the ePub you just made. Then look under the Tools menu and ensure that Enable Shar­ing is checked.

    Now go run Stanza on you iPhone/iTouch.
    On the bot­tom­line menu, select Get Books. Then, select Shared on the Top but­ton bar — your shared book should appear in the Com­puters Shar­ing Books section.

  9. Gretchen Avatar
    Gretchen

    Hi, you have no idea how happy I’m to see I’m not the only one try­ing to do this, my situ­ation is the following,I have a book (med­ic­al book to be exact) its in PDF, my ques­tion is how can I read it on my itouch? I have tried email­ing it to myself but its too heavy and my simple yahoo account does­n’t upload it, I’m los­ing hope, my main pur­pose in buy­ing the itouch was to be able to read docs, and pdfs on it.…

  10. Brad Grier Avatar

    Hi Gretchen, thanks for stop­ping by. Check out the pre­vi­ous com­ments and text about using Stanza to read ebooks — it’ll help.

  11. […] — if it’s in a digit­al format. I do this cur­rently with my iPod Touch, once I figured out how easy it was to view pdf and doc files on my Touch, that is. I expect that the iPad will let me view my .pdf and doc files in much the […]

  12. Looloo Avatar
    Looloo

    Hey Brad,

    Just thought I’d stop by to let you know how I appre­ci­ate people like you who respond to each and every com­ment and really try to help them out. 🙂 Really nice of you. 🙂

  13. Brad Grier Avatar

    Thanks Loo­loo, just happy that folk find what I write inter­est­ing enough to ping me about 🙂

  14. kyith Avatar

    GoodRead­er and Stanza are great. but i dis­covered a fast PDF read­er in FAST PDF. Its fast but i still think good read­er takes the cake.

    But ser­i­ously guys, how often do you read on your iPhone

    Fast PDF » http://www.productiveorganizer.com/iphone-and-ipod-touch-productivity/pdf-viewing-is-smooth-and-fast-on-the-iphoneipod-touch-fast-pdf-review/

    GoodRead­er » http://www.productiveorganizer.com/mobile-productivity/reading-books-on-the-iphone-with-stanza-and-goodreader/

  15. Brad Grier Avatar

    Hi Kyith, thanks for the com­ments and links — it’s appreciated.

    And actu­ally, I *used* to read quite a lot on my iPod touch. But recently I picked up a ded­ic­ated eRead­er (the Kobo). 

    The lar­ger form-factor does make a difference.

  16. desk_stage (desk_stage) Avatar

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  17. Steve Avatar
    Steve

    Apple’s iBooks read­er sup­ports pdfs. If you drop a pdf into your itunes lib­rary you can have it sync to your iPhone/iPad/iPod. Unfor­tu­nately set­ting up sync did not seem very intu­it­ive. I have not used drop­box, but it may be it is easi­er to setup.

  18. Brad Grier Avatar

    Thanks Steve! Sadly I’ve not updated this post yet, but your com­ment updates it nicely. 

    Do try Drop­box, if not for the read­er func­tion just for the abil­ity to have access to your docs on mul­tiple platforms.

  19. dickram50 Avatar
    dickram50

    To read pdf I installed the Amazon kindle app ver­sion 1.2 on my jail­broken iphone 3g. First, I con­nec­ted with putty and searched for *mazon* to loc­ate the kindle app dir­ect­ory. Then I con­nec­ted with win­scp (using win­dows xp) and put pdf files that I con­vert with this free soft­ware “auto kindle ebook con­vert­er” in this directory:
    /private/var/­mobile/Ap­plic­a­tion­s/4C­C7F426-BC83-4ECB-9D8D-678DA89A8e2B/­Doc­u­ment­s/e­Books

    Start the kindle app after you have copied the .mobi files (that are con­ver­ted from the pdf’s) to the men­tioned directory…

    Happy read­ings!!!

  20. […] writ­ten about it here, and it’s still a sol­id app you should check out, espe­cially since it’s free! […]

  21. Dani Avatar
    Dani

    hey i was just won­der­ing if files lite still exists on apps as i can­’t find it anywhere?

    1. Brad Grier Avatar

      I think they just renamed it to the Free ver­sion of Files: http://g1z.me/GW0L5S

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