[ecoolman]

Originally Posted by inpariswithyou

It seems like neither Calibre Companion or Moon Reader is available for iPads, although Mantano is. Does anyone have any experience with Mantano for iPads? If not, what is your favorite eReader, and why?

Originally Posted by inpariswithyou

the app is plain ol' ugly, I won't like it. I use PDFs and ePubs primarily. Annotation -- notes and highlights and bookmarks -- isn't required, but it's a nice touch.

Hi there, after reading this thread, I decided to give Mantano for IOS a try. This is my favorite reader on the Android, and I also use Calibre Companion. I use both EPUB and PDF, about 50/50, and prefer a single reader application for both formats.

As of this writing, I've used the IPad version for just a few hours of reading, and can confirm that it is coming along, but not quite up to par with the Android version. What I've observed so far:

• the TOCs are not displaying properly on both EPUB and PDF. I admittedly only tried a few of each, but none were right - some had a partial TOC, some had only one TOC entry.
• The gestures are a little different, pinch to zoom is used to resize text instead of up/down swipe on the left side, and the swipe for brightness isn't implemented (or I didn't find it).
• The app crashed once while flipping pages, after about an hour of reading.
• There aren't nearly as many settings, the one setting I would like to see them add soon is the "keep alive", to prevent the screen from going to sleep while reading. (ok, so I'm a slow reader)
• There is no "search" on the OPDS feeds, where there is on the Android version (more on this below).
• on the IPhone, the app crashes if I try to download an book from an OPDS feed (more below).
• The user interface is mostly identical to the Android version, so I felt right at home with it (I do prefer the Mantano UI over all others I've tried).

Even with all the above bugs, I would say this is my favorite ereader I've found for IOS, and I find it easily worth the $5. I've only been using the IPad itself a short time though, so haven't done a thorough search (I normally use a 10" android tablet).

Something that occurred to me while playing with Mantano on the IPad is that I don't really need Calibre Companion, even on the Android. When you start the Calibre Content server, it exposes your library in OPDS format. The Mantano Feeds feature is an implementation of an OPDS consumer - here's how you can get your books from Calibre directly to the Mantano Bookshelf on both IOS and Android without Calibre Companion, just requires a one-time setup:

1. In Calibre, click the Connect/Share button, and start the Content Server.
2. Click the Connect/Share button again and take note of the address and port beside the "Stop Content Server" option.
3. On the Mantano Reader home screen, select the Bookstores tab, slide in the Navigation Drawer from the left side, and note the "+" sign beside the "My Feeds". Press that, and set the title to "Calibre Library", and set the URL to the address from step 2 above, in the following format:
   
   http://<IP Address>:<port>/opds
   
   for example:
   
   http://192.168.1.100:5555/opds
4. Now anytime you need to load a book from Calibre, just go into Bookstores, click Calibre Library, find your book, and select the format to download.

As mentioned above, on IOS, the "Search" function is missing for finding books within the feeds, but to work around that, create some saved searches within Calibre, then you can simply click on those saved searches from Mantano, under the "By Searches" section. As an example, I prefer to read PDFs on the tablets, and EPUBs on the phone, so I created a saved search for "format:EPUB" and "format:PDF" to quickly find the desired format on the device.