Marvin skipping to next chapter not next page

[tillsbury]

Hi all, back again (but with a different username as mobileread doesn't want to send me a password reset).

Now, I bought an ipad air today, and hit the problem no doubt lots of others will, in that I can't load Stanza on it because Stanza has disappeared. So here goes the usual annual attempt to see whether there are any usable e-readers out there, except that this time presumably I have no option...

So, trying out Marvin, it seems ok so far. But the epub interpretation seems to leave a great deal to be desired. Although it works on the ebooks included with Marvin, on most of my other epubs there are all sorts of problems. Many books turn to the next chapter rather than the next page when I tap on the right of the screen. I can't read anything beyond the first page of each chapter. This isn't a one-off, it happens on lots of books.

Some others just come up with errors. "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" (downloaded from our local library) comes up with "This page contains the following errors: error on line 1362 at column 8: opening and ending tag mismatch: div line 0 and body", below is a rendering of the page up to the first error"

There follows the first two paragraphs of the book (and nothing else, since Marvin goes to the next chapter not the next page when you right-tap). Page two comes up with another similar error, in which the only thing rendered is the title "Part Two". It makes reading books much quicker, I suppose.

All of these documents are of course fine on Stanza, Megareader, iBooks (the new one) and reading them directly from Calibre.

Anyone else had this problem? Anyone got any ideas of other Stanza substitutes that can read epubs?

[At_Libitum]

not to drive you away from Marvin, as it is a very good alternative, but if you have downloaded Stanza in the past, and it is still in your cloud of 'Purchased' programs, or your iTunes app folder, can't you just install it on the iPad Air? I mean, I've got it stashed safely in a backup folder but its also in my iTunes app folder so any device I attach I can push it to.

pardon the slight OT

as an aside, where did these eBooks originally come from? Because I've never had this issue on Marvin, and I've thrown some crappy things its way at times...

and usually in my experience, when such an error comes up, it usually is exactly like the error says, if it isn't in the actual epub then it may have happened during the sending to Marvin. You mentioned Calibre, did you use it to send these books to Marvin? Or did you download them through Calibre's OPDS feed?

[tillsbury]

Good point. I downloaded them to Marvin via OPDS. I also (by way of a test) downloaded them through the same method to a new copy of MegaReader, and they are all fine.

I could try to push them directly to Marvin, to see whether it's Marvin's OPDS system that's broken, but it doesn't seem that likely that it would corrupt the epub in a way that it would still recognise.

No, you can't re-upload an app (even though I still have Stanza on my other ipads and iphone). When you transfer the app from itunes it doesn't actually transfer it, it reloads it from itunes and since it's been withdrawn it comes up with an error trying to install it. This is a complete pain in the proverbial as it's one of ipad's best features. The ipad air is a few hours old and already the least popular ipad in the house. I should really return it but I suppose for the future this is something that needs dealing with. At the very least it will give a further impetus to the authors of things like Marvin and Megareader to try to get them up to scratch. Sadly, if those authors haven't even seen Stanza it becomes a more and more difficult thing to shown them what needs doing!

[tillsbury]

The epubs have come from various places (I've tried a good number). Most were converted at one time or another by Calibre. The Guernsey one is a particular example of a commercial epub that was never fiddled with by Calibre (it's direct from Overdrive from the library). None of my epubs on my Calibre library have ever thrown an error, three years on Kobos, ipads with Stanza/MegaReader/Bluefire/iBooks, PCs and Macs using Calibre reader or Firefox reader.

[tillsbury]

Bingo! It does it on the included book "Heart of Darkness" too. And "The Count of Monte Cristo". Is there a setting somewhere I haven't found that makes right-tap jump to the start of a new chapter? I've already tried the "reset everything to defaults" option.

Or perhaps is this an ipad air / ios7.0.3 compatibility issue?

This is possibly a separate issue to the epub error one that I found on Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society...

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by tillsbury

Hi all, back again (but with a different username as mobileread doesn't want to send me a password reset).

Now, I bought an ipad air today, and hit the problem no doubt lots of others will, in that I can't load Stanza on it because Stanza has disappeared. So here goes the usual annual attempt to see whether there are any usable e-readers out there, except that this time presumably I have no option...

So, trying out Marvin, it seems ok so far. But the epub interpretation seems to leave a great deal to be desired. Although it works on the ebooks included with Marvin, on most of my other epubs there are all sorts of problems. Many books turn to the next chapter rather than the next page when I tap on the right of the screen. I can't read anything beyond the first page of each chapter. This isn't a one-off, it happens on lots of books.

Some others just come up with errors. "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" (downloaded from our local library) comes up with "This page contains the following errors: error on line 1362 at column 8: opening and ending tag mismatch: div line 0 and body", below is a rendering of the page up to the first error"

There follows the first two paragraphs of the book (and nothing else, since Marvin goes to the next chapter not the next page when you right-tap). Page two comes up with another similar error, in which the only thing rendered is the title "Part Two". It makes reading books much quicker, I suppose.

All of these documents are of course fine on Stanza, Megareader, iBooks (the new one) and reading them directly from Calibre.

Anyone else had this problem? Anyone got any ideas of other Stanza substitutes that can read epubs?

I just downloaded this eBook from the library. Can you please tell me where this error occured so I can double check with Marvin and the ePub? Also, do you have the latest version of Marvin?

[tillsbury]

Opening the first page. right-tap and you get to "part two" which contains the words "part two". Right-tap again is the end of the book.

The error messages don't appear on the other books I mentioned, but right-tap just goes to the beginning of each chapter.

[tillsbury]

Just downloaded shubook, which has been under my radar till now. Works well. A bit basic on the interface front, but it brings in opds books easily, and displays them neatly. The setup interface is poor but obvious and comprehensive enough. Once set up to your liking you don't need to go back and so to me that's not a big issue. Most important is that the apps gets out of the way quickly and shows the maximum book. And displays the book too, duh.

[Faterson]

No annotations in ShuBook, unusable for me.

What you are describing about Marvin never happens for me. Have you tried resetting the gestures on the "Gestures" pane in Marvin in-book settings? For some reason, your single tap is interpreted similarly to Marvin's "smart snapping" gesture. Try disabling and re-enabling the two 1-tap gestures.

Of course you can load Stanza onto your new iPad Air. Just back it up as an IPA file on your old iDevice using iFunBox. Then, use iFunBox to install Stanza on your iPad Air. Stanza is the original inspiration for Marvin, and to me, Marvin is already today miles better than Stanza ever was. (Heavy ex-Stanza user here.)

[At_Libitum]

no need even to back it up if it is still present within iTunes. Then there's already an IPA in the "Mobile Applications" in your iTunes folder. Just copy it out of there for safe keeping, don't trust iTunes to leave it there. I've got both 3.1 and 3.2 stashed away safely.

[kguil]

@tillsbury - could you send me an email at support@marvinapp.com? I've never seen this kind of behaviour before so you could help me identify what the problem could be.

[Quexos]

I sure hope Marvin won't disappear, it's by far the best reader I ever tried. I even found a couple of small things I was despairing to ever see anywhere on my Kobo. Like the ability to mark a book as unread and/or unopened which I love. On my Kobo if you accidentally open a book, it's marked as open and being a bit of a neat freak I don't want books I have not read appearing as open. My only solution was the annoying delete-then-plug-kobo-then-reload-the-book-again routine.
With Marvin I can simply flag is as unopened and if needed, unread.

Another thing I love with Marvin is the ability to change metadata right in your list of books. I personally hate when in my list, a last name comes first e.g. King, Stephen. Worse, when you have several books of a same author and some come inverted and others not so in your list they appear in a separate location. How annoying that is with my Kobo. The solution being the excruciating and time consuming messing with the css file or opf to find and change it on my computer. Now with Marvin it's done straight in the book list inside the app.

Sorry for my digression but this app is so great that I can't help but praising it. Now about this issue of page turns that go to next chapter, I never had that either, my books work fine. So could this be an issue of bad css or some other code error in the ebooks themselves ?

Originally Posted by tillsbury

Now, I bought an ipad air today, and hit the problem no doubt lots of others will, in that I can't load Stanza on it because Stanza has disappeared

[kguil]

@Quexos - thanks! I'm really happy you like Marvin.

@tillsbury - if possible, send me an email at support@marvinapp.com. I'm sure we can figure out what the problem is.

[1158pm]

I was having the same problem with some of my epubs. I was getting errors stating that there was an error with an opening and ending tag mismatch. I was able to fix my problem in calibre by right clicking the problem book and selecting "edit book". Inside the editor, click on Tools at the top, then Fix HTML - all files.

The only code that was removed from each file was this:
<meta content="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"/>
and an extra line break after the closing </html> tag.

This has fixed the problem I was having.

[The Old Man]

I also have the new iPad Air. I load epubs through Dropbox after doing a simple Alf through Calibre. I have also tried the before-mentioned Heart of Darkness. No problems at all. I think Marvin is great. Yes, Stanza is gone.