[leebase]

In the beginning was Stanza, and God said it was good. Fictionwise was a great source of books and Stanza could configure easily to other sources.

Then B&N bought Fictionwise and Amazon bought Stanza. And that was bad.

Apple came out with iBooks and of course there is the kindle app. I actually like the skuemorphism of the iBooks app and it became my default "non-kindle" book reading app. The "Open In" feature came along and removed the big sticking point of Stanza's feature.

Many ebook apps have since appeared. BlueFire was an "almost" but I just couldn't love it like Stanza.

But now there is Marvin and I am in love again. Marvin doesn't have the iBooks skuemorphism which many will like...but it has every imaginable formatting tweek such that I barely miss iBooks for that.

It HAS the great "connect to book servers" feature. It has the "drag finger to adjust brightness" that I loved in Stanza. Improved over Stanzas actually.

It has nice fonts (question: which fonts do you folks like best for reading).

It has this way cool feature I never even thought to ask for. It can "read' your book and create a compendium of all the names. I read lots of complicated books with many many characters. Reading Bourne Dominion and I had taken a bit of a break. With Marvin when a name appears, I can do a quick check of where that name was introduced into the story. FANTASTIC!

I'm sure there's more, but I'm already sold. Well worth they $5 for the iPhone version and the inexplicably free iPad version.

Now if they could just add the iBooks page curl and skuemorphism I'd REALLY be over the moon.