Greetings all,
I just wanted to chime in quick as BookShelf's author and answer a few questions from the thread.
As far as feature questions go, version 2.3.2 is out now which adds a left/right margin and improves reading on the iPad quite a bit I think.
BookShelf does *not* support ePub embedded fonts at this point. It will render any font settings from the book provided the iPad has the fonts installed, but no font embedding of additional fonts. That's something I'll spend some time looking into, but off the top of my head, I don't think it can be done with the public iPhone API.
BookShelf does support access to Calibre's media server option, though an oversight in the current version means that it can't handle authentication to a server that requires a username & password. If you're seeing the "loading" screen and then no books appearing, that's probably the issue. I've got that fixed in my local tree and will include it in the next patch release. BookShelf supports both "Bonjour" based location of shelfs as well as manually adding URL's for access through a firewall. If any iPad users are currently having this authentication problem and would like to try the beta, I can definitely make room for a few more iPad users. Just drop me an email (zac at iphone bookshelf dot com), and I can get you setup.
The other download option of course is ShelfServer which can run either in Tomcat or as a stand-alone headless process on 'nix systems. There's some configuration info that might help here:
http://www.iphonebookshelf.com/trac/...rverParameters. The easiest way is usually to just run the embedded version using `java -jar ShelfServer.jar` (instead of ShelfServerGui.jar). Assuming you use the same user account for both GUI & headless use, both versions will share the same config file. Just get it working the way you want in the GUI, then switch over to the console version and you should be good. Of course, if you want to run the service under a different account, just copy over & chown ~/.shelfserver/ and it should work.
For the page scrolling thing, I know that's a polarizing issue among ebook readers. You either love it or hate it.... You can probably guess where I stand on it. =)
That said, you can adjust the settings in BookShelf to get something akin to (but not exactly like) hard pages similar to what Stanza and other readers have. By default, tapping on the lower 1/4 of the screen will advance one full screen of text forward. You can change that if you'd prefer to tap on the top to go forward or to use the left/right side of the screen instead of top/bottom. There's also an option which disables the scrolling animation for this tap scroll.
I personally think between those two features you get the best of both as far as physical pages versus the malleable nature of an ereader. You still advance a full page at a time like a traditional book, but you can also scroll forward or back just a little if you want to re-center the page differently. I find that ability especially useful with reference books or other titles that have a mixture of text and images, tables, or other figures. You can slide the view so that the figure and the text that go with it are on one screen which is something that doesn't always come out correctly in physical pages.
Still, if you absolutely have to have page flip animations and hard page boundaries, BookShelf probably isn't your best option. I'd definitely encourage anyone to at least give it a try, though. I think the hybrid approach kind of grows on you, but admittedly I'm not the most impartial source...
I've also got a lot of new stuff in the works for the iPad that I think *might* be enough to count BookShelf as a worthy contender against iBooks. I've got position sync working, and that'll continue to work on 3.x devices, not just 4.x. I'm also looking at ways of improving BookShelf's use as a reference book reader to use the extra screen real estate more effectively. Even if you just keep the free version around and take a peek once in a while, I definitely welcome any input on current or new features.
-Zac Bedell