Moon+ Reader Pro: a novice's questions

[warwick]

This is my first post to these forums. I aim to share my experiences, positive and negative, with using Moon+ Reader Pro during the past week, and to seek help for some of my problems.

Some background. I do most of my reading in print, but I rely on my Android tablet (an Acer Iconia Tab A501) extensively while travelling, both for general reading and for travel guides. For some time I used Lumiread and two other e-reader applications, a result of purchasing DRM protected e-books from different distributors. Early this month, in preparing for a forthcoming holiday in Europe, I purchased 10 Lonely Planet guides as PDFs. These guides were delivered as 65 separate PDF files (one for each chapter) and they were a mess in Lumiread.

I experimented with a few different e-readers and acquired Moon+ Reader Pro, and consolidated all of my e-books in it. I consider that its metadata management capabilities are a significant benefit. I can use the “Edit Book Information” dialogue box to edit the book title, the cover title, the tags and the cover art in an easy-to-use manner. I can create tags such as “Travel. Ireland” and “Travel. Budapest” and use the “By Tags” display in My Shelf to restrict my display to (say) the 13 PDF files which Lonely Planet uses in its guide to Budapest. Being chapters, most of the files lack proper covers, and I can use “Select Cover” so that all the PDF files for a particular guide have the same cover appearance. By editing the Book Title and the Cover Title separately I can, if I wish, ensure that initial articles (a, an, the) are ignored in the shelf arrangement, which is especially handy in the “All Books” display.

So far, all good. But I have encountered four issues (so far).

ISSUE 1: Cannot import an individual book. Often when I download a book my tablet does not give me an “Open in … Moon Reader” prompt. Then when I try to import it using the Moon Reader “Import Books” function, I am allowed only to import all of the e-books stored in a particular directory. I have not found an option to import a single book, such as the one with the most recent date-time stamp. I have tried to get around this by moving the single book temporarily to a “New books” folder using my File Manager, but this seems a very cumbersome way of addressing the issue. Have I missed something, or is there a way around this?

ISSUE 2: My cover art is not stable. Often when I do import a book, I find that the changes that I made to the cover art, for all of the books in My Shelf, have been destroyed, and I have to re-do them. Why does this happen? Is there any way to protect my cover art changes? I now routinely use the “Backup” feature under “Options” and I am hoping that this will protect my cover art in future. But if I recover them by using “Restore”, won’t my latest book import also disappear?

ISSUE 3: DRM protected books. These books, purchased previously, cannot be read in Moon Reader unless I strip the DRM. As a first step towards this, I have installed Calibre, and I have read Apprentice Alf’s Blog post on this topic, but I would be very grateful for a guide on how to remove DRM using Calibre plugins. A simple, step-by-step guide for the average user who lacks an IT degree.

ISSUE 4: Best model for using Moon Reader and Calibre. I get the idea behind Calibre as a comprehensive front end for searching, acquiring, cataloguing and converting ebooks to a variety of formats. But Calibre is running on Windows 7 on my desktop at home. I want to be able to acquire and import ebooks while I am travelling away from home – at a writers festival, for instance. What is the best model for using Calibre in conjunction with a reader such as Moon Reader? How do other forum members use them in combination?

Sorry that this is such a long post. Some of my problems are no doubt due to my inexperience, and there may be straightforward solutions. Thanks in advance for your help.

[FatDog]

ISSUE1: The model they use is that you want every book in a directory to be imported and make the entire folder part of your local shelf.

But I have done the "import" and click the options (funny 3 horizontal bars in upper right corner) to turn on multi-select. Now I pick the 3-4-10 books I want to add and it only imports those books.

I have not connected Calibre to Moon+ but there are people who have done this. It usually also involves some cloud-based service like Dropbox or SugarSync. One computer hosts your Calibre and when you import books you somehow can 'push' selected volumes to the shared folder. The cloud service syncs to your android folder and somehow pushes the ebook into Moon.

I bought a BlueTooth keyboard to fix the book information. I got tired of fat-fingering the fields so prefer to use the cursor keys and tab/shift-tab to move the insert point around. It is also a lot easier to cut/paste as a bunch of my books seem to have the information like Title and Author flipped. Logitech makes a nice one that includes a semi-hard case for the keyboard that flips open to be a stand for the tablet.

I tend to never import books while traveling so I cannot help you with that model.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by warwick

ISSUE 3: DRM protected books. These books, purchased previously, cannot be read in Moon Reader unless I strip the DRM. As a first step towards this, I have installed Calibre, and I have read Apprentice Alf’s Blog post on this topic, but I would be very grateful for a guide on how to remove DRM using Calibre plugins. A simple, step-by-step guide for the average user who lacks an IT degree.

Detailed help with DRM removal is not permitted on MobileRead.

If you've read the posts and the readmes at Apprentice Alf's and you're still confused, ask there.

[GeoffC]

I use Moon+ Reader for those few books I download to my tablet; I assume the Pro version is better ? - Even if it 'just' gets rid of the annoying adverts.

[hidari]

I got the Pro version. I'd say it is worth it and supports the developer..... Plus the TTS works well on Moonreader plus with the Ivonabeta TTS voices...Free now in Beta.....

[GeoffC]

TTS is something I don't need, nor can use

[Dimitrios Spirou]

This is my first post..so please forgive me if I do something wrong...
I installed Calibre in my PC and I synced a couple of my ebooks with my Android device using Calibre companion. I used Moon+ on my tablet to read and comment on my ebooks but I can not get them synced back (with the comments) to my PC library. Is there any way to do this?

Thank you