[skillachie]

Hi Faterson,

Thank you for taking the platform for a spin and providing significant details about how you typically read.

We had to spend sometime writing from scratch core EPUB libraries across iOS, Android and Web to allow us to provide the experience power readers expect. Took us longer than anticipated but we are dedicated to our mission.

Well, perhaps there's some hope on the horizon. I've recently become aware of the cross-platform e-reader BookFusion, and I've been giving it a test drive on all 3 platforms (iPads, Android, web/Windows).

It's not "there" yet by any means (Moon+ Reader Pro is currently still clearly better on Android, and Marvin or MapleRead are currently still clearly better on iOS), but it certainly appears to be moving in the right direction! For one thing, it has those lofty cross-platform ambitions that Moon Reader or Marvin never even aspired to

Our Android app currently lags the features on iOS but we are actively releasing updates every 1-2 months. You can expect to see the same highlights and annotations functionality you see in iOS on Android in 4-8 weeks.

Curious though, for the iOS app what do you find lacking when compared to Marvin 3? We would like to ensure we have these critical items on our backlog.

The free plan in BookFusion is fairly limiting, and anyway, I can't possibly use BookFusion as my only e-reader at this point. There are several showstoppers for me – the main being, just like in Kindle and Google Play Books, the inability to annotate image-based PDF files via freehand drawing. But whereas I have zero hope that Kindle or Play Books will ever implement this feature (they are corporate software, after all, and so they despise users who ask for advanced features and customizability; they couldn't care less about them, because power users always only constitute a tiny proportion of their gigantic user base!), I do trust that it's possible for BookFusion to implement this crucial missing feature (and others) at a future point that is not all too distant.

You can start annotating OCR and Image based PDFs today using area/image based highlights. You can do this today by by right clicking on the PDF in the Web app. This feature is currently on the Web only but will be rolled out to iOS and Android soon.

See Area/Image based highlights mentioned at https://blog.bookfusion.com/web-app-...tions-updates/ . We will also support free hand form highlights at a later date but wanted to point out it is possible to annotate OCR based PDFs today.

I was surprised and delighted, however, that there is one feature where BookFusion, even at this rather early point in its development, excels over all the other e-reader apps. So, in fact, I do use BookFusion as my main e-reader (on both Android and iPads) for one of the books I'm currently reading. (I used to say, "I always read 7 books simultaneously", but nowadays, it's truer to say "I always read at least 12 books simultaneously".)

This is great to hear.

Before I found BookFusion, I was forced to resort to pretty desparate measures: using two various apps side-by-side (Moon & BookEra on Android; Marvin and its clone Marvin SxS on iPads), just to somehow manipulate the text so that I can see French on the left, English on the right.

See my tweet from back in July on this. Among other things, the screenshots there prove that e-books do look a lot better in Moon+ Reader and in Marvin than they currently do in BookFusion... But in this instance, functionality trumps looks for me (because as soon as you flip a page in Moon or Marvin, all the French & English gets mixed up – unlike in BookFusion), and so I switched to BookFusion for good, for reading this particular bilingual book.

Hehe did you use the same font style , margin, line space & background colors? See now reason why it should look significantly different

As a token of my gratitude, I subscribed to BookFusion's lowest paid annual plan (around €19), even though I'll probably only be using BookFusion to read this particular bilingual book and nothing else, which would be perfectly possible in the free version as well. In a year from now, I'll reconsider my subscription – if BookFusion makes substantial progress within the next 12 months, I'll be happy to prolong. I do believe developers should be rewarded for their efforts, and if the day comes when BookFusion satisfies all my reading

Thank you for the support. Let us know your top 3 -5 asks that you would like to see done in the next 6 - 12 months . We can start with the gaps from Marvin 3 once you get back.

I think the BookFusion developer is lurking somewhere around these MobileRead forums, and I hope my feedback from this post will be useful for him. To make it even more useful, in a later post in this thread, I'll be specifically listing all the showstoppers but also lesser deficiencies that currently make it impossible for me to consider BookFusion my main (let alone my only) e-reader.

Indeed, we try to keep our ear to the ground and try to engage with passionate readers when we can. Looking forward to the later post, we take everything as constructive feedback so please be candid with your responses . You won't hurt our feelings.