@chaley,
The new widgets look fantastic on both GNote3 and GTabPro.

I love that they are fully resizeable and the covers will expand/contract (to a degree) depending on how many "cells" you can afford to devote to them on the Home screen. Just a personal opinion but I have not found a widget in any other book app which looks/works better on either of my devices.
Regarding the shortcut: on both my devices the CC version is now the same height as those from the other reading apps.
I also have 6 books in all 3 widgets, but don't have any problem with Buy-5-get-1-free
ETA: Forgot to mention that 'Handle "portrait - expand to fill" cover mode when creating thumbs' is working fine.