AKICILJ: Two approaches to the same e-book problem

[carbonel]

I have an iPhone 3. It's running iOS 4.2.1. When I tried to update it to iOS 5 several months ago, I got an error message saying that iOS 5 isn't compatible with this model of iPhone. Okay, I can live with that.

But yesterday, I did something stupid. I had been refraining from updating apps on my iPhone because I was afraid the newer versions of apps wouldn't work on the older OS. Then I tried to install the brand-new Living Social app, and got an error message saying that I needed at least iOS 4.3. Okay, I said to myself, these apps are smart enough to know whether they're compatible or not, so I can update things after all.

And after I did that, Stanza (my e-book reader of choice) didn't work anymore. When I select it, it appears to open, but then it bounces back to the main screen. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling it, and that didn't help. I have to assume that the later version isn't compatible with my iPhone.

So -- is there some way to install an earlier version of an iPhone app? Or is only the latest and greatest (which seems to be incompatible with my iPhone 3) available out there in the cloud?

And approach two: While erikvolson provided the good news that Stanza still works in iOS 6, I do realize that its days are numbered, and I need to prepare for the evil day. The thing I like the most about Stanza is that I can control the way paragraphs appear -- I want them to be ragged right, no space between paragraphs, and indented. With Stanza, I can do that in the formatting options. It occurs to me, however, that ePub documents are editable. I've fiddled a bit with Sigil, which is a free ePub editor, but I don't really have a handle on how to do anything other than minor text editing. I suspect what I want is a basic style sheet that says plain text appears this way and not that way. Because I have certainly seen e-books with the kind of formatting I want, even if BlueNote and iBooks don't display that way by default.

1. Is this a reasonable approach?

2. Is there someone who would be willing to walk me through things, point me to a tutorial, or knock up a style sheet for me? I'm familar with them from Word (even if dd_b insist that they aren't real style sheets), but my HTML skills are pretty rudimentary -- and my CSS skills are nonexistent.

Help or advice appreciated.

Comments

[carbonel]

Unfortunately, I don't have a backup. I mean, I have the iPhone backed up to the computer, but not an older backup of the backup. I thought that was sufficient. Silly me.

After doing some searching on the Web, I discovered I wasn't the only one with this problem, but it appears the only way to install an older copy that I didn't download is to jailbreak the iPhone first. Do you have any idea as to how good or bad an idea this is? Also, do you know if doing that would wipe everything I currently have on the iPhone? It's essentially a firmware upgrade, best I can tell. The only thing I'd really want to export first is my phone contacts list and my calendar, but I don't know how to do that, either.

(My iPhone was a hand-me-down from my mother, and it's a Frankensteinian mishmash of her apps and mine. I'd really like to wipe the whole thing and start clean, if I could just get everything I need off of it first.)

[ckd]

I haven't jailbroken any of mine, so I can't really speak to the wisdom or lack thereof of doing so.