[Faterson]

Originally Posted by Faterson

Just curious, what "other types" of books do you have in mind?

Originally Posted by maxjens

Just a few formats: CBR, DOC, IMP, LIT, MOBI, PDB, PRC, RTF AND TXT. And offcource epub and pdf.

Erm, I apologize for saying this, maxjens, but that's nonsense. You're not suggesting that anyone with a sane mind would read unconverted DOC, LIT, PDB, RTF, TXT (etc.) files (especially long books!) on their iDevice?

Of course not... The first thing to do, is to convert those other formats into EPUB (it only takes a few seconds in Calibre), and then read those files using the best e-reader software that there is -- and that's Marvin.

That also applies to MOBI -- reading e-books in the Kindle app is so excruciating (at least to me) that it's definitely worth converting the MOBI book into an EPUB book (it only takes a few seconds in Calibre), in order to be able to read the book in Marvin.

Originally Posted by Faterson

Hope Marvin sticks to ePubs

I for one hope Marvin will add support for the comics format (CBR/CBZ).

Naturally, I'd welcome if Marvin also supported reading PDF files, because right now I'm "Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde" every single day: all the books I read, are split between two pieces of software -- Marvin (for EPUB files) and GoodReader (for PDF files).

However, becoming as excellent as GoodReader will be extremely tough to achieve for any software maker. In this sense, it might be more reasonable for Marvin just to forget about PDF support, and focus on EPUBs, like you say.

Originally Posted by crashnburn

What is the best PDF reader and Highlight and/ or Annotation app on the iPad as per you?

Hands down, it's GoodReader. I've already replied to you on this topic in the other thread you started.

Originally Posted by crashnburn

Can any of them "keep separate" or "merge' highlights / annotations and maybe be able to Backup/ Sync/ Save them?

Yes, GoodReader does everything you need to do regarding annotations. Its iCloud syncing of annotations works fantastically between my two iPads and the iPhone.

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

Can't PDF's be converted into EPub using Calibre?

It's ironic, but I have had better results when converting PDFs, using the outdated Mobipocket Reader, rather than Calibre. (The Mobipocket Reader install file for Windows is here.)

Here is an important thing to realize -- there are two types of PDF files:

1. PDF files that are originally text files and are then simply saved as PDF (often due to the cluelessness of the author of the text)
2. PDF files that are simply collections of images, photographs (includes all scanned/photographed books/documents)

Good luck trying to convert PDF files of the 2nd type! It's practically impossible -- the result will often be many typos on every page (or even line) of text. The best-quality OCR software is required to try and deal with this task, such as ABBYY FineReader -- but even then, lots of post-processing is typically required on the part of the user.

Even converting PDF files of type 1 often has bad results.

Generally, I avoid PDF files like the plague. PDFs are not a suitable format for e-books. I mostly only read PDF files of the 2nd type -- those that cannot possibly be reasonably converted from PDF into EPUB, without a tremendous loss of time on the part of the person who performs the conversion.