[Faterson]

My latest e-ink reader, the Onyx Boox Poke 4 Lite, has arrived, and I'm happy to report that BookFusion works on it just fine!

Here is BookFusion's home view on the e-ink screen:



When you make a screenshot of it directly on the device, it looks like this when transferred to a color screen:



That looks a lot worse than the black-and-white version in reality. (This cheap Onyx e-reader only has a screen resolution of 758 × 1024 pixels, which, on a color 6-inch screen, isn't enough for quality color display, but for a black-and-white e-ink reader, it's perfectly adequate.)

Here is a scanned PDF book (images only) when viewed in BookFusion on this e-ink device:



It's perfectly sharp, and a joy to read – even on such a small 6-inch screen.

In fact, I have discovered that BookFusion's display of PDF files is superior compared to Adobe Acrobat's display of the same PDF files! That's just incredible, and incredibly embarrassing for a multi-billion corporation like Adobe, that a startup like BookFusion can already beat it in terms of the display of PDFs. What I mean is, Adobe Acrobat is unable to remember the zoom level you prefer as you flip through your PDF book – it goes back to default zoom after every page flip. Well, that's corporate software for you.

As to EPUBs, here is one in BookFusion on this e-ink device:



Once again, perfectly sharp picture and a joy to read.

However, here we already begin seeing some of the current deficiencies of BookFusion on Android when compared to BookFusion on iOS. (I know it's only temporary.) For now, BookFusion on Android doesn't support paragraph alignment (no "justify paragraphs" is possible). Of course, that's elementary functionality. It was only added to BookFusion for iOS a few weeks ago, so I'm sure it will be added on Android as well.

Another deficiency is the inability to load custom fonts in BookFusion. I really like only two fonts currently offered by BookFusion: Bookerly and Volkhov.

Yeah, all the other BookFusion fonts are usable as well, but I just don't find them all that attractive.

This is and always will be entirely subjective. App developers can never oblige everyone's tastes in terms of fonts, so really the only proper way to deal with this is to enable custom fonts.

Compare the above screenshot with the following beauty – that's Moon+ Reader in e-ink, and books look just as stunning there as they do on a phone or traditional tablet. Why am I not surprised?



You can see the nicely justified paragraphs there, and a font that in my estimation is even nicer than Bookerly – Libre Baskerville, which I set up as my default Day Theme in Moon+ Reader. (That's very different from the ordinary Baskerville font offered by BookFusion, which I find too indistinct.)

You can also see the very nice footer offered by Moon+ Reader, whereas in BookFusion, there is no footer and header at all, as you read your book. In BookFusion, you need to tap the center of the screen, and only then, headers and footers appear. But unlike in Marvin, they are not customizable in any way. So, when it comes to headers and footers, there is huge space for improvement for BookFusion.

By the way, that small circle in the bottom right corner of the screen isn't Moon+ Reader or BookFusion, but Onyx Boox's "navigation ball". It can be completely disabled, but I find it useful (its menu options can be customized to your liking), so I keep it visible at all times. (The ball can be dragged to any area of the screen you prefer.)

Just to showcase Moon+ Reader's abilities in terms of custom fonts and themes, here are the 24 themes/custom fonts I set up in Moon+ Reader Pro on my new e-ink device (I later added Bookerly as theme/custom font no. 25):



I use dozens of dark themes, with custom background textures, on my iPads and Android tablets and on my phone, but here on the black-and-white e-ink screen, a dark theme really does not make sense. It just doesn't look good. I left one dark theme in Moon, just for the sake of formality (employing the only non-serif font I use: Futura), but I don't think I'll actually be using it to read anything on this e-ink device.

Same goes for custom background textures. They just make zero sense on an e-ink device, because they resemble ghosting that is such a negative feature of e-ink screens. So, now I understand you guys who were sneering at my suggestion that no custom background textures were BookFusion's current weakness no. 1. I guess all of you are e-ink fans! I still claim that custom background textures are the no. 1 priority (at least for my needs), but that certainly doesn't apply to black-and-white e-ink devices. (And probably not to color e-ink devices, either.)

Now that we've mentioned color e-ink devices: I have researched this some more, and I learned that when displaying any colored content, a color e-ink device switches to one third of the nominal resolution of its screen! That's completely ridiculous. No wonder folks are complaining about colored e-ink devices – both Onyx Boox Nova Air Color and PocketBook 741 InkPad Color. The colors are too washed out, they say, and black-and-white text too dark. No wonder, because what happens is that these color e-ink devices' screen resolution only gets used when viewing black-and-white content. When displaying colored content, their screen resolution gets instantly reduced by 66%.

For example, the PocketBook741 InkPad Color's screen resolution is 1404 x 1872 pixels (that's luxury on an 8-inch screen), but as soon as something colored needs to be displayed, the resolution drops to embarrassing 468 x 624 pixels! Yep, colors must look bad then. It's like going back to the 1990s, to all those fat VGA monitors with a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels.

I guess colored e-ink isn't ready for play yet, and we need to wait another 3 or 5 years for the technology to develop.

To sum it up, @skillachie, I don't think any major fixes need to be performed for BookFusion in order for it to be usable on a black-and-white e-ink device. I believe BookFusion on e-ink is just fine as it is now. Any issues I have observed are issues with the Android app, and have nothing to do with the black-and-white e-ink screen.

Maybe, if you could create an exclusive "Snow White" theme for BookFusion, that would probably be appreciated by e-ink users. Because any dark interface element tends to look awful on an e-ink screen. But even without such a "Snow White" theme, BookFusion is perfectly usable on e-ink as it is now.

Here, though, is another nasty Android bug, @skillachie, I discovered in BookFusion while testing it on the e-ink reader: when you open a PDF file in BookFusion for Android, it resets the fonts in all of your EPUB books (!) back to the default font, which is, naturally, ugly. It makes no sense for this to be happening, but it does happen – on Android. This nasty bug doesn't exist in BookFusion for iOS and for the web.

Some other Android bugs I noticed earlier were rearing their ugly heads on e-ink also. For example, you open a book, read it for a bit, yet it fails to appear in the upper You're Reading section. Once again, it's only a bug occurring in Android; iOS and web are fine.

Uploading a new book to the Android app is really a messy process – unlike in the iOS app or on the web, it's unclear whether you have imported the book successfully or not. And then, when you upload the same book a second time, just to make sure it's there, an error message pops up, saying, "This book already is in your library." But it can't be seen anywhere! Neither in the You're Reading section at the top of the screen, nor below among "All Books". Even force-quitting BookFusion and restarting the app several times doesn't resolve this issue.

Another important feature currently missing in BookFusion on Android is the inability to remove a book from the "You're Reading" section, etc., whereas this is possible in iOS and on the web. On iOS, you simply tap and hold any book, and various options pop up. No such functionality on Android currently.

As to Android apps, in general, on this e-ink device, everything is more or less fine. Getting Google Play Store enabled was a rather arduous, trial-and-error process, but I got it done eventually somehow. Most Android apps can be installed without any issues (such as Google Drive, Google Keep, Google Translate, any browser you want, etc.). A few refuse to get installed via Google Play Store, such as Dropbox, but I was able to install it using the Onyx App Store, even though it's an older Dropbox version that apparently never will be capable of an update. But Dropbox annotations syncing worked just fine for me in both Moon+ Reader Pro and in Adobe Acrobat even before I installed the Dropbox app – both Moon and Acrobat simply used my preferred Windows and Android browser, Vivaldi (the true heir of Opera!), to authenticate themselves via Dropbox's web interface.

One of the things that made me ecstatic about this new e-ink device is that you can even install SwiftKey keyboard on it – the finest Android and iOS keyboard there is. So, one of the things I kept mentioning to Sirtel in this thread as a major weakness of e-ink devices, no longer applies. Because using SwiftKey as your keyboard, you can type just as fast on your e-ink device as you can on your phone or regular tablet. I never expected that anything like this would be technologically possible, but it is very much reality now.

And so, in terms of annotations, I'm faced with the final obstacle: no multiple-color highlights on a black-and-white e-ink screen. Here is what multiple-color highlights look like on my e-ink device (screenshot is from Dynalist, my preferred note-taking app):



As you can see, even on a black-and-white e-ink screen, purple is very easy to tell apart from yellow and red. So, I might perhaps continue using these particular colors even on a black-and-white screen. However, the colors within the pairs of red and orange, as well as green and blue, are too close to one another, so I would have to ditch one highlight color within each pair.

Here is how KOReader and Moon+ Reader get around that obstacle: they support multiple types of underline. And that works equally well on black-and-white e-ink screens as it does on color phone and tablet screens. Single underline, double underline, dotted underline, dashed underline, strike-through and traditional highlighting – those would be 6 types of highlighters that don't rely on colors in any way.

Therefore, @skillachie, it would be great if you could enable these various types of underline in BookFusion as well, and they can then, on black-and-white e-ink devices, nicely provide the functionality typically provided by highlight colors on color-enabled screens.

As to default e-reader software installed on this e-ink device, NeoReader, it's completely unusable. Customization options are downright pitiful – broken or not really improving the display of books. Particularly the font selection is atrocious: I basically found a single usable font, and even that font is ugly. Perhaps NeoReader is more advanced on more expensive Onyx Boox e-readers, but this is a tragedy. I would uninstall NeoReader from the device immediately, but it can't be uninstalled – only hidden. OK. Since it's an Android device, I don't really mind – I immediately loaded all my books into Moon+ Reader, BookFusion and Adobe Acrobat.

Onyx's Book Store is useless as well. You can't actually buy anything in it (unless you're in China, I guess), so it only offers public-domain books, but in a totally haphazard, chaotic fashion. No organization whatsoever. And even the editions offered are very much suspect. I downloaded Adventures of Tom Sawyer as a test, only to find out it started in the middle of the book, and it was a slapdash Project Gutenberg effort.

Compare that with BookFusion's superb offering of free e-books in its own store. The Standard eBooks library is available, which, while being based on work of volunteers just like Project Gutenberg, only accepts top-quality work in its catalog, so these are superb editions. (Unfortunately, it looks like all Standard eBooks in BookFusion's library are in English only for now.)

As to this e-ink reader's battery, it drains pretty fast if you use it as a regular Android tablet, not really as an e-reader (particularly if you also keep the two separately adjustable lighting options active at all times: warm/orange and cold/blue light). In such a case, I guess the battery would only last about 10 hours, just like on a traditional tablet. However, if you do use it as an e-reader, and especially if you switch off screen lighting in daytime, the battery should last a lot longer than on a typical Android tablet. Is it going to be days, or weeks? We shall see. I've so far spent most of the time setting up the device rather than reading on it, so I've been unable to observe any e-ink battery advantage as yet, but I'm sure it will be there once I actually start using the device for reading books.

To sign off for today, I leave you with a joke. Whenever I install the predictive SwiftKey keybaord on a new device, and set up sync with my cloud account in it, I let SwiftKey type out an entire nonsense letter for me, based entirely on its own predictions, drawn from my writings over the years. I always have a good laugh at whatever SwiftKey comes up with. At the same time, it's slightly alarming. If the following letter that SwiftKey automatically typed out for me after getting installed on my new e-ink device truly reflects the habitual state of my mind and soul, I think I should go and consult a psychiatrist right away:

I just completed an activity with Runkeeper and I am not sure what to do with it but I will be sure to send it to you as soon as I can manage to make myself understood sufficiently in your language to explain that you do not know what to do with your life and how you can be a good writer and you are a vibrational writer and you are a writer and a writer is a writer who writes about the world of art and photography for her and her wife and friends who have a great experience in the area of art and photography and the Philosopher’s Stone is a great place to work with and enjoy the outdoors and the beautiful beaches and beautiful colors and the style of the world and the education of the world and the world of the rule of life and the world has changed much in recent years and the world is a very popular place to live in and out of that area of life and the world is a very close relationship with the energy that is your Source which does always feel good to be a loose puck and a good idea to have a good life.