[Faterson]

Originally Posted by Faterson

iPad was just the first truly usable tablet.

Originally Posted by Quoth

No. Nothing like.

Yeah, right. In my region of the world, there's this saying (used to describe persons making manifestly false statements with huge confidence):

"Everyone around me is crazy – it's just me who's an airplane."

Originally Posted by BookCat

Proof reading and editing are normally done on Word.

Yup, and human transportation was normally done by buggies drawn by horses.

But, you know, it's 2022 today. There are more efficient ways to proofread than to plague yourself and/or your client with Word documents.

Word is office software, but books, by definition, are no office documents. At most, they can be MS Office documents (which is a different thing), but they definitely don't have to be that (during the writing or proofreading process).

I write creatively myself, and I wouldn't dream of using such a heavy-handed, unwieldy behemoth of software as MS Word to do that. It's like shooting sparrows with cannons.

(For creative writing, I use Standard Notes; and for drafts of my creative writing, I use Dynalist.)

Originally Posted by DNSB

Unless you dig into it's menus, Moon+ Reader does not respect the CSS.

You know, as I mentioned previously, I don't really care if Moon (or any other e-reader) "respects the CSS".

To me, that's a technocratic way of looking at things. Egotistic, if you will: publisher-oriented, rather than reader-oriented.

As I mentioned, the first thing I do after opening any EPUB book, is to override the publisher's settings and preferences.

So, why exactly should it be important for e-reader software to "respect the publisher's CSS" if I don't wish to see it anyway?

Nope: what I care about is a nice, elegant display of the e-books I read.

Because I spend dozens of hours reading a particular book by intently looking at it, a nice display of the text is my no. 1 priority when choosing e-reader software.

I know of no e-reader, on any platform, in which books currently look more beautiful than in Moon+ Reader Pro. If you know of such software, please be specific and I'll be happy to test it.

Originally Posted by DNSB

I read several books where Moon+'s display of the page was pathetic.

I believe you. If I encounter books like that in Moon as well, of course I'll be re-evaluating my assessment of Moon. Because I have not had such experience as you do, in my 10+ years of using Moon as my main Android e-reader, I'm sticking with it for now (and consider it 4-star software), despite all its flaws, just as I'm sticking with Marvin on iOS for now, despite all its even greater flaws.

But I'm ready to move on from both, if a better option presents itself – ideally a cross-platform e-reader. That's why I launched this thread.

Can BookFusion be that new option that exceeds both Moon and Marvin in quality? Maybe. The future will show. Right now, BookFusion is below both Moon and Marvin, in my experience. (And I'll post a brief list of reasons as to why, later on in this thread.)

Originally Posted by DNSB

Then we have issues with fixed layout ePubs.

To each his or her own but, you know, to me a "fixed-layout e-book" is an aberration.

I define an e-book as: here is a freely reflowable text whose looks I can customize to my own (not the publishers') liking.

Yeah, there can be some components within e-books that require a fixed layout, such as tables, for example, but those tend to be rare exceptions, in my experience.

If a publisher carefully specifies, within CSS, the looks of a table and its fixed layout, yet Moon+ Reader throws all of it out the window and displays the table in a totally different way, I don't really care: as long as the table still remains readable on a comparable level with the original, with all meaning-carrying components intact, and is nice to look at. That's really all that counts for me.

If you're a publisher who spent hours carefully adjusting that CSS, and then you see Moon+ Reader disregard it, I understand this can be terribly frustrating for you as a publisher. But as a reader, I don't really care.

In contrast, I'll give you an example of what I find totally unacceptable in Moon+ Reader – one of the reasons why it's 4-star software to me, not 5 stars. It's a major flaw that it shares with Marvin, BookFusion and others.

Upon highlights/annotations export, Moon+ Reader (and Marvin, and BookFusion...) converts all highlights to plain-text. (Moon and Marvin don't even respect paragraph breaks upon highlights export; BookFusion at least does that, but that's not enough.)

See, that is something that is truly unacceptable. No e-reader software can aspire to be called "professional" if it mangles highlights (converts them to plain-text) upon their export.

That's because features like italic or bold are ways of communicating the writer's meaning. If you remove the author's emphasis from his or her text, the exported text is no longer authentic. It can no longer be used in any scholarly or professional setting.

So, yeah, that's what I deeply do care about and what I find unacceptable: corrupting the original writer's meaning. But ignoring the publisher's CSS? Go ahead for all I care, as long as it doesn't affect the writer's meaning and as long as the resulting e-book is a joy to look at.

Originally Posted by Quoth

Loads of Android ereaders are better than Moonreader.

Such as?

Originally Posted by Quoth

KOReader is also better than Moonreader.

What "KOReader", please? I can find no such app in the App Store. Please post a specific link if you can.

Originally Posted by Quoth

If you want TTS

Nope, zero interest. (I don't consider audio-"books" real books, just as I don't consider listening to books "reading" them. Books – unless they're lullaby fairytales for infants – are typically meant to be read, not to be listened to.)

Originally Posted by Quoth

Pocketbook for Android

It's OK, but decidedly inferior compared to Moon+ Reader, in terms of elegance of display of e-books. And that's my no. 1 priority, along with preserving the writer's original meaning, as explained above.

The display customization options available in PocketBook are downright pitiful compared to Moon+ Reader, so it's no contest to me.

Originally Posted by Quoth

otherwise Lithium

Never tested so far, will give it a shot. Thanks for the recommendation.

Originally Posted by Quoth

Aldiko Basic used to work well

I did test Aldiko repeatedly and, again, it was decidedly inferior compared to Moon+ Reader, so I uninstalled it.

Originally Posted by Quoth

Android 4.x

Erm... any reason for you to be repeatedly mentioning Android 4.x as any sort of criterion? It's 2022 today, we're dealing with Android 12 this year, I believe, so why even mention ancient ruins like Android 4?

Anyway... to haul this thread back on track: its aim isn't to find the best Android e-reader, but the best cross-platform e-reader.

I'm grateful to my friend who emailed me the other day, because thanks to him I discovered PocketBook Cloud – a new feature, apparently, that did not exist yet when I purchased my hardware (and outstanding) e-ink PocketBook (740 InkPad 3) back in September 2018.

BookFusion developer, if you're perhaps lurking around here and reading this, I think PocketBook can really be a serious competitor for you.

Because whereas BookFusion limits you to 10 books for free usage (used to be 25, now only 10), PocketBook Cloud pretty much gives away 2 GB of free storage to every user, with no usage limitation at all.

Plus, of course, you can also purchase an e-ink PocketBook to give your eyes some rest, whereas there is no e-ink BookFusion e-reader.

So, I think BookFusion really needs to be a lot better than PocketBook, to counter all those advantages PocketBook is offering over BookFusion.

Right now, in terms of quality, BookFusion and PocketBook strike me as pretty similar. Meaning: perhaps tolerable, but not outstanding. They also share some of the same flaws: the main flaw being the impossibility to annotate image-based PDF files in any way. But whereas such a flaw can be tolerated in completely free software such as PocketBook, it's hard to justify paying a three-digit annual subscription price and still encounter such functionality gaps.

By the way, that PocketBook Cloud functionality isn't (for now) available on that e-ink PocketBook I purchased back in September 2018. But inside comments below a YouTube video, I managed to unearth a statement by PocketBook techsupport, saying that if anyone wishes to enable PocketBook Cloud on an older e-ink device, they should simply e-mail PocketBook's techsupport, along with the serial number of their device, and they will do their best to enable PocketBook Cloud remotely even on such an older e-ink device. So, I'm looking forward to that.

SUMMARY. From what I can see, there are basically these 4 candidates for cross-platform ereader use:

• Kindle
• Google Play Books
• PocketBook
• BookFusion

(Perhaps Kobo might be added to the list, if it also offers a desktop app?)

Right now, I find none of the 4 (or 5) options listed above really usable. Kindle and Play Books are too elementary, offering next to no display customization. PocketBook seems only slightly better in this regard. BookFusion says it wants to outdo both Moon+ Reader and Marvin in terms of customization options one day, but for now, these are just intentions, not reality. And all the options listed above currently share certain huge flaws, such as the inability to annotate image-based PDF files.

What it comes down to for me is this: out of the 4-5 options listed above, where is it most realistic for us to expect improvement?

And I say, it appears that BookFusion is the most realistic candidate.

There's practically zero chance to expect Kindle or Play Books to improve substantially. As corporate software, they despise power users. They couldn't care less about our demands for advanced customization, etc.

Kobo and PocketBook are fairly large brands, too (PocketBook, I think, was originally launched by a Russian in Switzerland), so is it likely they would wish to cater to the demands of the tiny minority of power users? I don't think so, I'm afraid.

It's really ironic, isn't it? Logically, one might expect that the larger the software corporation, the higher the quality of the software it puts out!

In reality, it's frequently pretty much the reverse. The larger a software corporation is, the higher the probability it will ignore your specific demands, and laugh you off as a hopeless and annoying geek.

For every dissatisfied geek user of corporate software, there are hundreds of happy users of that same software, with modest demands. So, corporations don't give a damn about geeks of the variety frequenting these MobileRead boards.

That's the sad state of affairs among e-reader apps, and that is, I believe, the reason why, in my estimation, no professional-grade e-reader app currently exists on this planet.

Nope, not a single 5-star app. Moon+ Reader Pro with its 4 stars might currently be the best of them all (as I perceive it).