Micah,
Here are, to my mind, the top 4 features that Bluefire Reader needs to improve in order to be able to compete with Marvin. As I see it, Marvin is by now clearly superior over Bluefire Reader, despite being a much younger app. Marvin has now completely replaced Stanza for me -- in fact, it's now better than Stanza ever was.
The one theoretical advantage Bluefire has over Marvin -- electronic library lending -- is not available for me, because like Wulf said, nothing like that seems to exist here in Central Europe.
As to DRM-protected books: whenever I buy a book, I'm convinced I'm entitled to read it using the best currently available software, and I proceed accordingly.
Here are the 3 things Bluefire Reader is currently missing:
- paragraph spacing (very important)
- line spacing (less important)
- better annotations functionality (crucial!)
The last one is the dealbreaker for me. If I remember correctly, Bluefire only offers a single highlight color. That's not enough -- Marvin and iBooks both offer 5 highlight colours. Marvin allows you to export, import, share and restore all highlights and annotations using the HTML or CSV formats -- it's absolutely unique in this regard, as far as I'm aware. Until Bluefire equals Marvin in this respect, I can't even
consider reading books in Bluefire.
In addition to the 3 missing features listed above, there is that long-standing Bluefire bug discussed earlier in this thread: difficulty to highlight words with ease. Try highlighting the same passage in Bluefire and Marvin -- it's a breeze in Marvin, but it's a struggle in Bluefire.
In any case, good luck with your app, Micah, and I hope you can give Marvin some serious competition in future! Competition will only make both Bluefire and Marvin better and better.
