[Archived] Marvin ePub reader for iPad

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by artbatista

I have tried this Alex, doesn't work. Dropbox loads 1000 books, apparently at random, then sorts those 1000 books by "newest". Those may or may not be the latest 1000 books.

As I said, the Dropbox API is broken in my opinion.

That's too bad.

Originally Posted by artbatista

I sent correspondence to Dropbox about the 1000 items limitation, got zero, zip, zilch, nada, no response to multiple queries.

Well, of course! Dropbox is now a big corporation, right? It almost seems like natural law: as soon as you become a big corporation, the quality of your customer support drops down to zero. Whereas here we have Marvin, created by what seems like a company of one person, and the customer support is superb. Isn't that highly ironic? One might expect that among the thousands of people on their staff, the corporations would find enough employees to take care of the corporation's customers properly. But nope, that's unlikely to happen. Instead, it's likely for Dropbox to follow in the footsteps of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and practically every other corporation out there, in offering atrocious customer support, or frequently no support whatsoever.

Originally Posted by Faterson

A related (futuristic?) feature wish I might submit: not sure if this is technically possible, but I would welcome if Marvin indicated to us, while we're browsing the Drobpox listing of books, or an OPDS catalog, that we already have a particular e-book stored in Marvin at that moment. There could be a check-mark shown next to a book title, or something similar, telling us we don't need to bother downloading that particular book into Marvin, because it's already there in Marvin's Library.

I must correct myself here: Marvin does indicate the presence of a book in Marvin's Library by the missing cloud icon next to the book title in the Dropbox listing. But there is no such feature while browsing OPDS catalogues, or (obviously) book websites. Not a big deal to me, only a "would be nice to have" feature.

[kguil]

@edbro Not yet. Improving this is on my high priority list.

@Rhialto There is a problem in that Dropbox themselves only give me the first 1,000 results. I'm experimenting with a way to side-step this limit.

@ProfCrash You'd be pleased to know that very soon, people who have their entire libraries in Marvin will experience much faster startup times. Marvin will start up between 5 and 10 times fasters especially in libraries containing 1,000s of books. I'm also working on a new method to organise libraries.

@artbatista I think I found a way to "work around" the limitation without upsetting the DB people.

[Kretzer]

Originally Posted by Faterson

You can't do that in the App Store directly on the iPad or iPhone, which is where users typically search for new apps. So that this particular workaround is useless there.

I know the link hack is not for everybody, but it's useful if you're curious, say, about a special app. On the computer you can change the store's country using the icon in the lower right corner.
I did mention iBooks in my review, btw, and it passed without problems.

Originally Posted by Faterson

Marvin will allow you to load all of your 2000 books using either the OPDS catalog access to Calibre, or the web access to Calibre.)

Just that you can't do multiple downloads in the current version, so that would take some time ... I wouldn't want a single list with 2000 titles anyway, so it's worth waiting a bit.

Rhialto, do you really have 2000 books in iBooks now? How are they organized?

Originally Posted by DaleDe

This is off topic for this thread but yes there are CSS constructions that will prevent this sort of thing. We have groups to talk about this kind of constructions. For example the two sections you want together can be grouped in a <div> and then set CSS to avoid breaking it. It is also possible to create a CSS for the first paragraph after a section and keep it together with the heading. This is certainly not a Marvin issue.
Dale

Thank you Dale!
I know this doesn't belong here, but I will follow those hints to the other threads and move up to higher levels of formatting.

[Rhialto]

Originally Posted by Kretzer

Rhialto, do you really have 2000 books in iBooks now? How are they organized?

Just by genre: Fiction, non-fiction, Crime and mystery, sciencefiction and fantasy.

Its fairly quick to select multiple books in iBooks and then drop them into a sub-library, and I have done this as I add them over the years.

[ProfCrash]

Heck, I only have 400 books in Marvin. But the faster start up time will be appreciated.

[kguil]

ProfCrash: It is noticeable. For instance, in my experiments, depending on the size of the ePubs, a library of 1200 books could take up to 90 seconds on an iPad 2. In the version I am working on it takes less than 5.

[Rhialto]

Lots of good ideas here. I would settle for just being able when using Marvin to browse DropBox or a catalog to tell if the book is in Marvin's library.

However, one point - many of us have Wifi-only iPads, and are not always connected to the cloud; I commute every day on the subway and fly quite often. This is another reason I prefer to have my library available on my device, especially as its what I primarily use my iPad for.

Originally Posted by Faterson

By the way, this discussion might perhaps inspire Kris to do something I know he wants to avoid: integrating Dropbox into Marvin on a deeper level.

To me personally, this feature has zero importance, and there are likely lots more important features Kris might wish to work on instead, but I can imagine a Marvin user like Rhialto would love such deep Dropbox integration in Marvin.

It's probably a futuristic concept, and likely not made possible by Dropbox as of today, but wouldn't it be great if we could simply browse Dropbox folders from within Marvin, while the books would be displayed in a similarly smart way as they are displaying when we browse, say, an OPDS catalogue in Marvin?

Or think of this: when you browse your folders with photographs in your Dropbox app, you automatically get to see the thumbnails of all photographs. Wouldn't it be great if, while browsing Dropbox folders with e-books in them, we'd automatically get to see the thumbnails of all the book covers? And if clicking on such a thumbnail of a book cover would display that book's metadata and description? Also, it would be great if we could virtually sort books present in our Dropbox folders: for example, we might pick the "Sort by series" sorting option in Marvin, and Marvin would sort all the e-books from Dropbox using that particular criterion -- while the e-books would still remain stored not locally on the iPad, but in the original Dropbox/Calibre folders. I'm afraid this isn't currently possible, because there is, I guess, no way to extract a book's metadata and book cover from Dropbox, without downloading the entire book.

So none of this will likely be possible for Marvin to accomplish without Dropbox meeting Marvin half-way, so to say, by extending the current Dropbox functionality.

If that worked, though, it would be the best of both worlds. For a Marvin user like Rhialto, the difference between having a book stored in the cloud, and having it stored locally, would pretty much disappear. Downloading a typical e-book takes only a few seconds, after all, so there would be no reason to permanently store our e-books in Marvin. For this, though, like Rhialto said, the display of books stored in Dropbox folders would need to be similarly smart as it is now in Marvin's internal Library.

A related (futuristic?) feature wish I might submit: not sure if this is technically possible, but I would welcome if Marvin indicated to us, while we're browsing the Drobpox listing of books, or an OPDS catalog, that we already have a particular e-book stored in Marvin at that moment. There could be a check-mark shown next to a book title, or something similar, telling us we don't need to bother downloading that particular book into Marvin, because it's already there in Marvin's Library.

[ProfCrash]

I have to do some clean up in Calibre but I love having my librry on one device. My Kindles are loaded. I just wish folks would answer the question at hand and not pontificat on why their way of using an app is best.

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by Rhialto

However, one point - many of us have Wifi-only iPads, and are not always connected to the cloud; I commute every day on the subway and fly quite often.

No help with flights, but for regular commuting, I find that the iPhone's "mobile hotspot" feature, introduced in iOS 5 (I think), works very reliably and promptly for me. One tap of your finger -- and you can share your iPhone's 3G connection on your WiFi-only iPad, even while on-the-go.

(This presumes that you also have an iPhone and that the iPhone has access to mobile data, but I know this is true for many iPad owners.)

[Rhialto]

Originally Posted by Faterson

No help with flights, but for regular commuting, I find that the iPhone's "mobile hotspot" feature, introduced in iOS 5 (I think), works very reliably for me. One tap of your finger -- and you can share your iPhone's 3G connection on your WiFi-only iPad, even while on-the-go.

(This presumes that you also have an iPhone and that the iPhone has access to mobile data, but I know this is true for many iPad owners.)

I do use my Android phone's mobile hotspot from time to time, but don't get a cell phone signal on the subway round here.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Jessica Lares

Saw this on MacRumors and thought I'd share here. This is currently free, but will soon be $2.99 according to the developer. I really like what I've seen so far. Has so many customization options, color choices are great, can set the margins all the way to the edge, can double space, triple space, or really squeeze text closely together, and it has Dropbox integration.
...

Is it like this?

[artbatista]

I was checking Marvin in my wife's ipad mini, which is set to Spanish. I noticed that in the USA Spanish iTunes site, there are no reviews, not even descriptions of the app.

Disappointing to say the least......

Art

[MeSue]

I've had Marvin warn me that a book I was attempting to download (from Calibre server) was already in my library, but I don't know what would happen if I already had it and then tried to download the same book from another source.

[Faterson]

The same warning would pop up. In fact, Marvin wouldn't particularly examine if the two files are truly identical -- it seems to go by file name only, and if you attempt to load a book with the same filename as already used by another book in your Marvin Library, Marvin will refuse to load the second book.

[maxjens]

I showed the Marvin app to someone who has only one eye for reading. Due to the many features in the reading section the person (80 years old), can read the books better than normal books.

Than i showed the library section and like ibooks or stanza or shubook the images are so small that these cannot be read by someone with an eye problem. Also the text going with books was to small.

So my request to you is: "is it possible to enlarge the text just like in the reading section and / or make the image much larger?

By the way i was amazed at how much text i could get on the screen when using very large letters and tweaking margins etc. I think this is the power of Marvin.

The size used is almost as large as the font on the ipad keypad (ipad1).