[Archived] Marvin ePub reader for iPad

[mariosipad]

@kguil

Kris I have sent you a PM. Is that ok?


........... and "problem" fixed! (Fix will be in one of the next updates of Marvin).

Thank you Kris

[mariosipad]

@Kris

I found another "strange behavior" of the combination Marvin and COPS. It's no problem, but .....

Unsupported formats in Marvin are greyed out. (Mobi, PDF, etc)
I have some Lit and Imp files in my Calibre Library.

In Calibre they are not greyed out, but have [...]. They are not downloadable.

In COPS they are not greyed out as Mobi files are, but have a [>] sign. You can tab on it and a new (actually the same) menu page will open. If you want to go back in the menu structure you have to tab the return key [<] repeatedly (same times as you tabbed [>]).

Again this may be a COPS problem, but hopefully this behavior of Marvin can be caught.

[stwc]

Hi Kris -- I registered here just to say thank you for Marvin. I've been watching Stanza get choked out by progressive iOS updates for years, and Marvin is the first worthy replacement I've found after much looking. It truly is great, especially with the 1.2 release that you just dropped.

I also want to thank you for making it free (with purely cosmetic, equivalent-to-donation purchaseable addons, if I understand your strategy plans for monetizing) -- that's really important to me, as well, and shows a generosity of spirit that impresses me a lot (as does the way you've responded to people in this thread over the months). I haven't looked to see if you have a Paypal donation button over on the Marvin site, but if there is one, I'll be shooting much more than the $1 or $2 the app would cost on the app store. If not, please set one up!

I've been reading almost exclusively on a succession of devices (each one better than the last) for about 13 years now, and Marvin has literally everything (now that you can connect to Calibre and online OPDS servers) I want in a reader.

Except, and this is a bit dumb, I feel, for one tiny, tiny thing. I know it's a bit silly and skeumorphic, but I really love the 'realistic' page turn feeling (you know, as if the page is being grabbed and turned in 3D) in Stanza (and iBooks, as I recall). I wonder if you'd consider adding that as a page transition option, if it's not a difficult thing to do.

At that point, there's literally nothing else I can think of that I'd want from Marvin as a power user. As soon as I finish my current book, I think I'm going to upgrade to the latest iOS, move my library over to Marvin (or recreate it from my Calibre install on my desktop), and never look back.

Thanks again, man. It's hard to express how important having a good reader is to my quality of life as an avid reader, and how nice it is to have someone making one who has as strong an aesthetic sense as he does an understanding of what functionality is really important. Cheers!

[KiLeAk]

Originally Posted by kguil

Hi KiLeAk, unless the cover is in the ePub, Marvin cannot read it. Are you referring to when books are downloaded from Calibre's OPDS server (that might be the only case I can do this)?

There aren't any immediate plans for PDF support. I understand the need to have a unified library but there many, many really good ones out there and working on something to out-do them would be a massive undertaking.

PDF support, understood and do agree. Will take a look at some of the suggestions below. PDF reader that connects to OPDS?

But cover art, it would be books pulled from an OPDS source - apps like Megareader do this well (as in, honour the cover art) but its such a bloody ugly interface ;-)

[pvs]

*kguil

What a wonderful program Marvin is now, congrats on a super app. I'm amazed how fast pages load on your app. I'm noticing one thing with placement of covers for myself with Marvin app, they seem to be farther placed to the right. I'm comparing the views of your app vs. kindle app on my ipad mini. This is the view I get from a book I scanned and made into a ebook. The book cover shows centered in sigil/ibooks/calibre/adobe digital editions/sony reader for PC.

(Kindle App Screencap: Left) (Marvin App Screencap: Right)

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

This is a very simple process to test.

1) load a new epub into Calibre
2) edit the metadata of that epub within Calibre by changing the cover image
3) right click on the epub from within Calibre and select "open containing folder"

you will see (at least) three files: cover.jpg, metadata.opf, and ___.epub (plus any other formats you may have converted to)

4) open the cover.jpg. It will be the new cover that you just changed.
5) drag the epub to whichever viewer you wish (I used ePubreader in firefox because it was easy)
6) you will see the ORIGINAL cover

7) go back to Calibre and "save to disk"
8) again drag the epub to your favorite viewer...you will see the new cover.


I just did this and...voila!

Bad idea. It doesn't work well. It invokes a conversion. Use the Modify ePub plugin to change the metadata and the cover. It does so without a conversion. Then all you do is open containing folder, copy the ePub and done! No conversion was done. No code harmed.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by kguil

The main problem is that I went for a completely custom UI, layout, buttons, menus, etc... (for instance, currently the iPad version has about 1,100 individual graphics assets). The iPad/iPhone versions won't be scaled versions of each other - there would be too much compromise. Of course there is a good amount of code that is reusable. The app will be universal though.

My options would be (a) make the iPhone app feature-equivalent to the iPhone version and take longer, or (b) release a good, usable iPhone app faster and make it catch up over a number of updates.

Go for option (a) because I know how people can be. If you go for (b) and people find it not good enough, the reviews can be not good. That won't help the iPhone version of Marvin to have a lot of bad reviews.

[Turtle91]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Bad idea. It doesn't work well. It invokes a conversion. Use the Modify ePub plugin to change the metadata and the cover. It does so without a conversion. Then all you do is open containing folder, copy the ePub and done! No conversion was done. No code harmed.

I wasn't recommending you do that on a regular basis. I was simply showing Fraterson how to prove to himself that Calibre doesn't automatically save changes to the ePub file...

And that is probably proof right there that we need a Marvin sub-forum so we can break the thread up into conversations that aren't confusing!!

[kguil]

@mariosipad Can you rephrase? I'm not sure I understand what is going on.

@pvs I'm aware of the cover issue. I'm working on it.

[mariosipad]

[QUOTE=kguil;2411822]@mariosipad Can you rephrase? I'm not sure I understand what is going on.

Kris, I can try.

The first Thumbnail is from Calibre
The second Thumbnail is from COPS

The first picture shows what I expected. (updated from my earlier post)
The second picture shows 2 books with an [>] on the right hand side of the book item (with the small "covers"/icons).
Pressing [>] gives the same screen again. If I want to go back in the menu structure I have to press [<] on the top of the screen twice (to go back to the authors page).

One of these files is either:
A - an "imp" e-book. Marvin cannot read this, I know. Should this file not be greyed out?
or
B - a txt file in the same directory as an epub file with the same name. Epub is probably a converted txt file.

In Stanza downloading this file gives an error.

Kris, don't waste your time on this now. I will test this further and maybe come back on it when I know what is going wrong or not as expected.

[maxjens]

Kris,

love your app, it just looks great.

Noticed the following and didn't see it planned in 2.5:

• Add OPDF in Cloud
  After adding OPFD feeds I didn't see them in the OPDF Catalog screen, but in the Favorites. Would expect all in Catalog screen and the favorites in Favorites.
• OPDF Catalog
  If one selects through Favorites an OPDF Catalog then one sees the feed, in the left top corner there is a < option, that does't work at the moment, only when one stays inside the feed. If the previous option would work than it would be nice if this option also works.
• sizing of Covers
  With pinching one can reduce the size of the image, is it an idea to allow one more pinch and give only booktitel and author.
  
  With reversed pinch, no idea how to call that, one could go from single line, to small image, to larger image, to ... (i would love cover flow).
• tag info next to books
  When showing the books I see titel, author and a lot of info i do not use like tags. The real info is in the summary, why not show that instead or give the option.
• cover images slightly distorted
  I read that you get the cover image from the epub, when showing them as thumbnail they get slightly distorted. I see this also in shubook and stanza, so this could be outside of your control. The new ipad 3&4 screen should be able to show better images.
• response slower than shubooks
  When opening a opdf catalog of substantial size the response time is equal to stanza but slower than shubook. Shubook in that sense feels snappier.
• Home button
  In a book the home button returns me to the catalog, in al other instances i go back to the first screen. In general i would love both options Home and Library. The icon in the book reader is a home icon and not a library icon.

I am looking forward to the new version and hope my remarks are helpfull. As a and ipad reader i think you created one hell of an app.

Frank

[ProfCrash]

I will chime in that I would love a seperate topic for novice users, ie people like me who can use technology, are capable of removing drm type thing, and not much more. Most of the discussion in this topic is well above my head.

[orion2001]

Great release Kris. Congratulations! I love all the changes and am looking forward to whenever smooth scrolling makes an appearance as well.

The one minor suggestion I had was for a way to discard the epub cover image and instead just show the ebook kind of like iBooks does, with just the title and author name. I know that most people would never do this, but I have started using Marvin for some technical ePubs and some of them have some generic image for the cover (example" the Java Tutorials epubs). As a result, a whole bunch of files have the same cover image and it is hard for me to know which one is being shown in the thumbnail library view (not the full library, but the screen when you hit the Home icon from within a book). So I always have to go back to the full library so I can see the titles of the books and choose the correct one.

Should be easy enough to implement I would imagine. Where you have a selection for the Epub image, you could have another option for ignore ePub image/cover image.

Also, are there any plans to include the ability to have folders/collections in Marvin to organize your ebooks? Right now everything seems to get pulled into the "root directory". Thanks and keep up the awesome work!

[kguil]

@maxjens: I'm still looking into this issue.
@orion: Noted. I like the idea.

[Turtle91]

Booklist with no images to cover flow by pinching (or backwards by gnihcnip)....nifty!