iPad Epub reader

[ccowie]

I can see from previous threads that GoodReader seems to be the most recommended app for PDF reading. What about for EPUB books?

I have a Sony 950, which I will continue to use for reading. But I have many epub cookbooks with beautiful pictures and diagrams. I looked forward to getting my Ipad so I could have a better look at my cookbooks.

I currently have Mega Reader, but I really don't like it. There doesn't seem to be any way to sort my books into categories and there's no easy way to navigate through the book. I'd like something that actually shows the page number and a quick way to navigate back to a table of contents or skip to a specific page number.

Any suggestions?

[JSWolf]

Bluefire Reader is the ePub app of choice for the iPad. It's the one I use. Bluefire supports Adobe Adept DRM and it supports DRM for library ePub.

[murraypaul]

Bluefire is very good.
I still prefer Stanza for non-DRM content due to the greater customisation, but the future supportability of Stanza has to be very questionable.

[kyteflyer]

Maybe iBooks is what you need, You can avoid the bookshelf look, and get a list, with categories, which seems to be taken from tags. Its not as good as Stanza, support for which is nonexistent, not just questionable, but its probably the current best of the bunch, especially for your cookbooks. Page numbering? not sure. ToC... only if the author has that encoded into the book. Don't be too quick to blame Megareader, I've used it with books with ToC and it works fine (its not my choice of reader, though)

You might also take a look at Apabi Reader. It manages Categories in a strange kind of way, but heres the thing, you can define a particular category and set that as active, then when you sideload, whatever you sideload will end up in that category. Its a bit mad, you'd be having to add a new one for each new set of books before you start sideloading, but it would work, and you can only view one category at a time... which will avoid huge listings. The only thing is, the categories seem to be listed not only in a popup but also across the bottom of the screen... theres an arrow to get to categories which you can't see right away but its a bit clumsy. I dont see any page numbering but that might be a feature of the book I am reading. The ToC is present and chapters are selectable. I've inserted the link above, but sadly its all in Chinese (the app is in English) and google translate isn't terribly helpful. Nor is going to the website, even its english version.

This also makes me want to look more closely at iBooks which can have additional sections added, apart from "Books" and "PDF". I've not looked at that closely but it could be useful.

[pwalker8]

Right now I use iBooks for epub and PDF's. iBooks seems to have better organizational ability than any of the other reader programs I've tried, believe me, that's damning with faint praise, but at least with iBooks, I can group my books into collections, order by author and order by title.

[JSWolf]

But with iBooks, you get issues you don't get with Bluefire as iBooks is non-standard. Also, you get wide margins you can't do a damn thing about.

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Right now I use iBooks for epub and PDF's. iBooks seems to have better organizational ability than any of the other reader programs I've tried, believe me, that's damning with faint praise, but at least with iBooks, I can group my books into collections, order by author and order by title.

And still, I find Stanza to be better at organization. Not only does it allow you to create custom collections, it can also recognize tags/subjects in EPUB and automatically makes collections based on those (grouped separately from user-created collections).

Why is it that a 4-year old app such as Stanza has all these features (and actually most of these on release) but new apps don't? Heck, some reader apps can't even render simple bold and italics.

[JSWolf]

Stanza has it's own set of oddities that you may not want to have to deal with.

[keeska]

I got tired of the nonsense the authors of bluefire were pulling refusing
to support jail broken devices so went searching for an alternative. I found eBooks Reader (in the app store - JB not required) which actually seems to me to be a better app then bluefire. eBooks Reader does everything I need and I have had no problems with it.

kees

[Philantrop]

Originally Posted by keeska

I got tired of the nonsense the authors of bluefire were pulling refusing
to support jail broken devices so went searching for an alternative. I found eBooks Reader (in the app store - JB not required) which actually seems to me to be a better app then bluefire. eBooks Reader does everything I need and I have had no problems with it.

eBooks Reader is simply a re-branded Bluefire Reader. :-)

[keeska]

Originally Posted by Philantrop

eBooks Reader is simply a re-branded Bluefire Reader. :-)

Maybe but it doesn't have the "won't work on JB devices" nonsense that bluefire does. It works on both non-JB and JB.

If it is really bluefire rebranded then it shows how nonsensical bluefire is in refusing to work on JB devices.

kees

[Philantrop]

Both BF and ER are generally working on jailbroken devices - they both suffer from a huge problem with backgrounding, though. And just because Libri don't tell you that, they still have *exactly* the same issues because it's *exactly* the same app.

libri.de even has an FAQ entry for the JB issue, btw. :-)

[keeska]

Originally Posted by Philantrop

Both BF and ER are generally working on jailbroken devices - they both suffer from a huge problem with backgrounding, though. And just because Libri don't tell you that, they still have *exactly* the same issues because it's *exactly* the same app.

Sorry to disagree but eBooks Reader has no problem on my JB iPad with ios 5. After using it I simply exit the app and everything else is fine. I continue to run other apps without problems.

When exiting BF the iPad is hung. I need to restart it - nothing else works.

I just tried a test to verify the behavior - read 20 pages from an ePub format book in ER and then exited. Ran several other apps. All worked fine. Tried the same with BF. The iPad was hung when I exited BF. All I could do was force a restart.

So if they are the same app why does one behave and the other one hang my device?

I just asked a friend to try the same test on his JB iPhone. Same results.

Forgot to mention - I do not use backgrounder since it does not work on ios5 and can hang the device. Therefore I am not able to use the suggested workaround to work around the bug in BF.

[seajewel]

i tried Bluefire again on my iPhone (since my new iPad just arrived today!) and came up with yet another reason I prefer Stanza.. and for that matter, almost any other ebook app. Unless I'm missing a setting, it doesn't register swipes, only taps? I've come to rely heavily on the fact that I can swipe to turn next page where a tap would only turn to previous page. Stanza allows me to configure tap zones (I have tap anywhere for next page, so I can just swipe to the left if I need to go back a page), but even apps that don't let me do that I can swipe to go to next page when holding the phone in my left hand to read. Otherwise I have to make weird contortions in order to get the page to turn. This function seems pretty basic in almost every app but apparently doesn't work in bluefire. My apologies if I'm somehow missing something, though.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by keeska

So if they are the same app why does one behave and the other one hang my device?

From memory when this was discussed in the Bluefire thread, because the workaround to prevent issues with jailbroken devices leads to poorer performance for all devices. In the main app they didn't want to make the app worse for everyone to work around an issue for the small number of people running jailbroken devices, when there was already another workaround available.