We've all been there before, you get to an exciting part of a book - a chapter where suspense, ingenuity and magnificent prose have melded together to make it unputdownable. Then the light starts to fade, you're a passenger in a car or train and you can't do anything about it. You strain your eyes a little, desperate to get to the end of a chapter and then find that you're presented with a cliff hanger and must go on but you can't as the light is now gone completely.

It was a refreshing change then, a few weeks ago, to be able to read the whole of Gogol's Taras Bulba while on a night journey. I was able to curl up in the seat with my headphones and my phone and read thanks to Stanza, a quite exceptional free eBook reader app for iPhone.  It's an exceptional app - it does exactly what it says on the tin but it does it smoothly and professionally. There are so many options to get the font and spacing displaying just as you like it for comfortable reading, you can use coverflow to choose books in the same way you choose albums on the iPod and you can even change the cover if you don't like the one on the book. The controls are simple; to turn to the next page you tap the right side of the screen, to go back a page you tap the left. Tapping the middle of the page brings up other options and gives you information about how far you are through both the chapter and the book.

Another great point about it is the range of books available; you can't presently buy unless you have a US billing address. (Though one website still think I live at the Waldorf Astoria so that is subvertible!) But there is a huge selection of free books available from Gutenberg and FeedBooks - naturally the free selection is heavily biased toward things that are in the public domain but this gives a great variety of classics, including many that are no longer in print. You can click on and get a new book in minutes, downloaded straight to your phone. You can store as many as memory will allow.  If you're a keen reader and have an iPhone or iPod touch then I think Stanza is a must have app.