[Archived] Marvin ePub reader for iPad

[Quelch]

I'm helping my sister-in-law set up her iPad as an eReader and Marvin is highly recommended here so I'll help her download it

How do I do that ?
I'm a Nexus 7 user not iPad so I'm bumbling around a bit

Would mobi format be best for Marvin or ePub ?

[Faterson]

Marvin is not yet available for Android (Nexus 7). You read EPUB books in Marvin, not MOBI. (But MOBI can be easily converted into EPUB, if needed.)

On your sister-in-law's iPad, tap the "AppStore" icon, and enter "Marvin" in the Search field. Then tap the "Free" button to download and install Marvin. It's a 1-tap affair and only takes a few seconds.

[kguil]

Quelch, I'd you're having difficulties finding Marvin in the App Store you can go to marvinapp.com and you'll see a big, black App Store button with a direct link.

[Quelch]

Thanks for your guidance Faterson and kguil

My sister-in-law is a movie buff and she likes to read the original books that older movies are based on
Such as 'The Aspern Papers' and 'The Turn of the Screw' by Henry James
She does presentations about the movies in her movie club

Now I know to get the epub versions of the ebooks
Next I'll have to figure out how to get the eBooks onto the iPad
Shouldn't be too hard
It's easy on the Nexus 7

Thankyou both

[kguil]

Quelch, if you run into trouble and need assistance doing this, feel free to send me an email.

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by Quelch

Next I'll have to figure out how to get the eBooks onto the iPad

There are many ways to do that, all very quick and easy. (There is no big difference between Android and iOS in this regard, either.) Two of my favourite ways are:

• Just email the book to yourself (or to your sister-in-law). She can then open the book in Marvin from right inside the email attachment.
• Drop the book into the sister-in-law's Dropbox (SugarSync, Box.net...) account, then open the book in Marvin from the Dropbox (SugarSync, Box.net...) app on her iPad.

[crashnburn]

K - I love Marvin but for some reason I like the way iBooks shows the LIST of Highlights and Annotations.

I can see the color and the context. I'd hope you can add this as a rendering option.

PS: Are you designing and structuring your app on some kind of schema? I'd love to help with that if needed.

[HAS]

Hi there, I downloaded Marvin yesterday & love what I see until now ����I recommended to friends at work & they downloaded too. I cannot transfer files from goodreader (which is my primary file organization app) to Marvin. Can you assist with that? Also, connecting to Dropbox through Marvin does not show PDF books, is it that Marvin does not support PDF? I cannot see Marvin among the "open in" options of my other apps, any suggestions?

I hope that these are non issues (just me not figuring out how to do them) because I would like to have Marvin as my main ePub/PDF reader

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by HAS

Hi there, I downloaded Marvin yesterday & love what I see until now ����I recommended to friends at work & they downloaded too. I cannot transfer files from goodreader (which is my primary file organization app) to Marvin. Can you assist with that? Also, connecting to Dropbox through Marvin does not show PDF books, is it that Marvin does not support PDF? I cannot see Marvin among the "open in" options of my other apps, any suggestions?

I hope that these are non issues (just me not figuring out how to do them) because I would like to have Marvin as my main ePub/PDF reader

Marvin does not support PDF.

Dale

[HAS]

That's too bad many professional books are PDF. I would still use it for ePub but would have to see if the extra features offer enough advantage over iBooks which has been working well for me till now. Maybe there are future plans for development to support other format?

[HAS]

The transfer issue is resolved! The reason I was not able to transfer is that I was trying a PDF book transfer!
Thanks Dale, you answered all my questions

[murraypaul]

There are already many accomplished PDF readers for the iPad you could try.
GoodReader is one that is frequently recommended.

[crashnburn]

Originally Posted by Faterson

Strongly disagree, and earlier in this thread, I explained in detail why, along with screenshots of my favourite textured backgrounds. They are anything but frivolous -- I consider them a crucial feature still missing today in Marvin, and I've been waiting for it ever since Marvin first came out back in December. It's one of the very few areas (perhaps the only area???) in which the half-dead Stanza is still superior over Marvin today.

For example, I would trade in all the improvements in Marvin's import capabilities and Library management, for the feature of textured backgrounds. Why? Because I spend 99.99% of my time actually reading (and annotating) books in Marvin, not importing, accessing or shuffling them around in the Library. Those are all complete trifles, to my mind, compared to the importance of page backgrounds -- something I'm staring at all the time. I find solid-colour backgrounds (of no matter what colour) dull and therefore fatigue-inducing, which is why I can't wait to see user-customisable structured backgrounds implemented in Marvin.

I am open to the possibility that it could have some benefit, but then you have to realize that I may NEED more colors for HIGHLIGHTING even more

Each of us have our own minds and how they operate Such is life.

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by crashnburn

then you have to realize that I may NEED more colors for HIGHLIGHTING even more

I absolutely agree that having an unlimited number of highlight colours in Marvin would be nice. I was only explaining why I understood Kris was not particularly keen on working on implementing that particular feature wish.

Originally Posted by crashnburn

K - I love Marvin but for some reason I like the way iBooks shows the LIST of Highlights and Annotations.

I can see the color and the context. I'd hope you can add this as a rendering option.

What do you mean, crashnburn? Marvin shows the colour & context of highlights and annotations in the list, too.

What I would welcome, is if Marvin allowed us to filter the display of highlights & annotations in the current list. That is: I might wish to see only blue highlights for a moment, or only blue & purple highlights for another moment, or all of them (as now)... I would welcome some kind of "smart switch" there. (Look at the old Mobipocket Reader in the desktop version... the annotations filter is very nicely done there!)

While you mention iBooks, the annotations there are an utter load of crap & totally unusable. No reasonable, truly useful export options of annotations there (email is useless). The most outrageous shortcoming of iBooks annotations: if you comment on a passage, that passage will not appear along with the annotation, when you export it! This is silly beyond words. iBooks is just a big fail, as I see it. Not a serious reading tool by any stretch of imagination; it only pretends to be that; useless for scholarly purposes.

Originally Posted by HAS

That's too bad many professional books are PDF.

I strongly disagree. Many amateurish books are PDF -- and they (again) only pretend to be professional. A true professional realizes perfectly that PDF is an unusable, user-unfriendly format for electronic publishing, and makes the effort to publish everything that needs to be published, in the EPUB format instead.

Believe me I know what I'm saying here, because I'm professionally involved with publishers. It's human nature to be lazy. Publishers are humans, therefore they are lazy. (There are exceptions, as always.) You know why so many books are published in the unusable, rigid PDF format? Because publishers only need to press a button, and out comes a PDF file. In contrast, creating a truly usable EPUB edition of the same book, would require genuine effort on the part of publishers.

That said, I would welcome if Marvin one day supported the PDF format, too. But, at least on the level of quality offered by GoodReader today. Otherwise, I'm OK with GoodReader. I'd like to abandon the PDF format for good, and never see it again in my life -- but it just isn't realistic. One reason is that publishers are lazy, and another reason (in relation to scanned/photographed old editions of books) is that OCR software, in the present day (even the best of them, which is FineReader), still isn't smart enough to enable a fully automated conversion of scanned images into truly readable texts, and therefore acceptable EPUB editions. A lot of manual effort is still required in 2013, to produce a good-quality EPUB edition. The EPUBs offered by archive.org, for example, are only parodies or imitations of legitimate EPUB editions.

[Rhialto]

Obviously he means professional in the sense of books FOR professionals. Technical books on software, web design, and most textbooks for example are usually PDFs.

Nothing to do with *publishing*.