Bluefire Reader for Windows released

[Micah]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Couple of things I don't like is that hyphenation is turned off and that eBooks are automatically added to the Bluefire library and that's going to eat disk space that I don't want to waste. The library adding should be an optionand hyphenation can also be a configuration option. But for now until these are fixed, I'll stick with ADE 2.

FYI, I'm looking into the hyphenation issue. Thanks for reporting that.

Also, agreed that the there should be more control as to where ebooks are stored and whether they are auto-copied to a central location.

We've had a team working full time for the last year and a half to get to this 1.0 state. It is a significant undertaking, and we are a small indie company. So, there's lots of work still to be done to get to a mature product.

That said, I hope that many find it a great start and some will find it pleasant and useful. We need more choices on the desktop - especially for DRM content - mainly so that more booksellers world wide can compete in the space. I personally think that having a diverse market for ebooks is really important, and it is why we do what we do.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by Micah

Unfortunately device rotation support on Windows did not make our 1.0 cut. So, no there is no rotation lock either at this point.

Ok, in that case it's completely worthless (at least for me).

[lkmiller]

Originally Posted by Micah

The Adobe authentication service encountered a service outage this evening, from your description, it sounds like that is what you ran into. Adobe has had some struggles with that lately for some reason (reason unknown to me)

Yes, that must have been the problem because I got logged in the next day with no trouble. It would be nice if the error message said that it couldn't connect to Adobe. As it was, I figured it was a bug in the program.

[artig]

Another feature missing from Bluefire, essential when reading reference books, is the ability to return to the previous position after following a link to a footnote, endnote, etc. At least I haven't been able to find any method to return or go back. Perhaps implemented as a multi-level undo function so you can follow more than one link.

[Micah]

Agreed. A back button is very high on the to-do priority list. Didn't have that on iOS initially either, but glad to have added it long ago now. I use it all the time.
-Micah

[NDJorgensen]

Micah,

I want to thank you for finally bringing Bluefire to windows. I've always been a Kindle person because of the page syncing capability, but I've been frustrated since buying a windows 8 tablet because neither the kindle desktop nor kindle for windows 8 would sync non-kindle documents with my android tablets, and iphone. Now that Bluefire is available for windows I finally have a solution for syncing reading location between all of my devices.

The only improvement suggestions I would request are:
1. Please add syncing of notes and highlights between devices. I frequently load work documents (contracts, etc) onto my devices to read and mark-up while traveling. I'll use my laptop in the hotel room, then pick up the tablet in the airport or on a plane. Kindle always worked great for this before I got the win8 tablet. (And it would also be great if the highlight function on the iphone worked more like the Kindle where you just drag a finger to highlight text instead of having to select a word then expand the box around the text you want to highlight).
2. Any chance of adding support for mobi files? I've got loads of books already in Kindle mobi format. I can convert them to epub with calibre for now, but it would be great to be able to load them to Bluefire in their existing format and not have to go through an added step to convert them.

Anyway, thanks again. Loving the app so far.

[Micah]

Thanks for the kind words, I'm glad you are finding the Windows app useful.

Syc Annotations: I certainly do want to add that feature ASAP. Not sure how soon we can get to that, as still really deep in adding EPUB3 support at the moment and it is a monumental undertaking (been working on it for 1.5 years now already. Yes, it is that hard)

Mobi Support: I understand that would be useful. But I don't see us doing that anytime in the foreseeable future. Sorry to say. Just not something we could make any money on (we license our software to ebook retailers to make a living and Amazon is not a customer and unlikely ever to be)

-Micah

[Micah]

FYI, added a back button to Windows app. Testing now and hope to release update in the next few weeks.