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Old 08-26-2017, 11:27 PM   #1
Faterson
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Posts: 1,525
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Join Date: Oct 2011
Location: Bratislava, Slovakia
Device: 3*iPad, SamsungNote & Tabs, 2*OnyxBoox, Huawei 8″, PocketBook
Arrow The Status of Marvin

Fellow Marvin users, we've got to realize that Marvin is a product of lucky coincidence, no more.

If Amazon hadn't killed Stanza, Marvin likely wouldn't exist.

It's just that after Amazon killed Stanza, Kris got so mad he could no longer read his e-books in acceptable e-reader software, he decided to create his own app to read his e-books in.

The results of his effort likely surprised Kris more than anyone else. I mean the reception here from the MobileRead crowd. There's a thread somewhere in the archives, from late 2011 or so, that shows Kris positively stunned by how well-received the original Marvin was. He never, ever expected such enthusiastic reception, I'm sure.

So, Kris then plunged ahead with gigantic enthusiasm, eventually creating the superb Marvin 2... but also burning himself out in the process. I still remember his 18-hour workdays, for weeks and months on end.

After Marvin 2, we arrived at the stage where Kris himself evidently got satisfied with Marvin's feature set (he finally got his Stanza replacement, after all – with a vengeance!). At the same time, given the App Store's pretty insane pricing model, where top-quality apps like Marvin are expected to be sold for a couple of bucks, the sales of Marvin cannot possibly sustain Kris's livelihood.

If Marvin was a desktop app, prior to Apple's invention of iOS, Kris could charge, say, $40 for it, and no one would bat an eyelash. But times have changed. Top-quality mobile software is supposed to be dirt-cheap nowadays. As a result, mobile developers go depressed and/or broke, and they stop developing the apps. (My favourite iOS plain-text editor, Permanote, formerly known as Nebulous Notes, has been chugging along in near-death agony for a couple of years now.)

In a better scenario, the mobile app switches to an annual/monthly subscription model, like the journaling app Day One recently did, and I have purchased their annual subscription for $26 or so. Whether that's going to be enough to rescue the app from dying, remains to be seen. How many people would be willing to purchase an annual subscription to use an e-reader, though? I love Permanote/Nebulous Notes, but I have rejected the developer's offer of a monthly subscription at something like $8. Sorry, but to pay a hundred dollars a year just to be able to use a text editor... that's insane. Apple's App Store model is insane, too (mobile software is too cheap!), but some of these subscription models go to the opposite extreme of being way too expensive in providing what can be seen as basic functionality.

If Marvin announced a monthly or annual subscription model right now, would I subscribe? No, I wouldn't. Marvin still lacks essential e-reader functionality, such as highlights and annotations syncing. Years have now passed, and there's been no development in this regard – or much development in any regard, as others have observed in the most recent substantial thread on this board.

Yes, Marvin 3 was a nice refresh, and there was a brief flurry of activity associated with it, as well as a crippled Beta-testing process (more like an imitation of standard Beta-testing). The putting to death of a supremely useful user-feedback tool such as GitHub, which to this day lists dozens (or should I say hundreds) of unresolved user requests and reports, only confirmed that no full-fledged troubleshooting regarding Marvin 3 ever took place or was even intended. All the Marvin 3 hoopla subsided pretty quickly, and now we're back to inertia.

Does the minor update from a couple of weeks ago qualify as disrupting the inertia? Broken-record apologists will once again cry, in (fake?) tears of joy, "Yes!" I say, "No, it doesn't." The most recent update brings some minor improvements that apparently Kris himself found desirable while reading books in his own software; Kris likely wished to fix these minor glitches for himself or persons close to him, and so he did – and in that way, he also fixed them for all the rest of us.

It's the original "Marvin development model" all over again, you know? "Do something for yourself, and then perhaps other people – ideally, the entire world – will also benefit from it, even though they weren't really the original and primary recipients of your effort." There's nothing wrong with that, of course. This is the real life. If app development doesn't bring food on the table, that's how top-quality apps will be developed in future. Users will be at the whim of the apps' developers, because app developers must earn their livelihood in other ways, unrelated to our much beloved apps.

I still use Marvin as my main e-reader, but mostly because it's so extremely difficult to switch to a different app once you've grown used to it. MapleRead and Hyphen are worthy competitors, though; I don't rule out switching to them from Marvin later on.

I never heard about tiReader before today; it certainly looks nice from the app description, and I put the most expensive Pro version on my wish list. Should I buy it? Will there be no regrets? Is it, too, a worthy competitor for Marvin, just like MapleRead and Hyphen are?

As to the GoFundMe idea proposed by Ferante1, I'm all for it and am absolutely willing to put up $10, $20, or even $30 for the prospect of Marvin finally supporting highlights and annotations syncing (and other sorely missed features) after all these years. As opposed, say, to a subscription model with no specific improvements in sight.
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