[pwalker8]

This past weekend, I had to re-populate my various ebook apps with the books from my library on my iPad mini. (I'm a developer and actually do this not infrequently). I use the Marvin, iBooks and Kindle apps for various reasons. I also use the Goodreader app for PDF's, but I only have around 20 or so PDF's so it's not a big deal. Here's what I found.

iBooks was the easiest to re-populate, just choose sync all books and let it work. However, it also took the longest. The iBook sync process is slow. I also had to sync twice to get all the books.

Since the Marvin plugin no longer works for Calibre, I downloaded via the Calibre OPDS method. This took some effort since there is no "get all" option. I had to select each book and download them in groups of 90 or so. With that said, it really didn't take all that long since the download was fast. I really wish there was some alternate way to sync the categories between devices, not just the location in books. That and the inability to order books in a category manually are the two features in Marvin that I want the most.

The Kindle app combined the worst aspects of Calibre and iBooks in that I had to select each book and the download took a long time.

All in all it took a couple of hours to get all the books (roughly 2400 books for each app, though it was a bit less for the Kindle app since not all my books came from Amazon).

A couple of gotcha's that I ran into.

First, I had a number of books in the Kindle app not download at first because it said that I had reached my limit of downloads. It turned out that I needed to go into the manage devices on the Amazon web site and remove my old devices. I actually went ahead and removed all devices except my actual kindle reader (which I haven't turned on in years) and my mother's iPad, then went in and reauthorized my two iPads. When you remove a device, then all the books are deleted from that device. Yea, that's one reason why I always download, de-DRM and load a book into Calibre as soon as I buy it.

I had to sync the iBooks a couple of times to get all the books. I guess the sync times out or something.

wrap up - I really wish there was a calibre for iDevices where I can download my library and sync with my main calibre instance on my Mac. In an ideal world, I would use that to select what book to read, then have the app send the ebook to the appropriate ebook reading app for reading. IMPO, there isn't that much of a difference between the apps when it comes to actually reading the ebook. The Kindle app has the best sync reading location between devices. I do most of my reading in the Marvin app, mostly because of the way it allows me to manage my library.