iPad Bookmaster - ePub and PDF reader for iOS

[rfog]

Originally Posted by tbergman

I've been using the new release for about a week now and I can't thank you enough for adding the ability to suppress the long press gesture. No more accidental highlights and selections! A huge improvement.

It's now far and away my preferred reading app.

Updating read position must be done automatically when closing the book or the app and not manually. Perhaps sync read position from other device could be manual as it is in Marvin.

[odamizu]

Originally Posted by sbaylor

... Thank you for your suggestion and describing the usage scenario [see time when reading]. Anyone else seconded?

I can see this being useful at times, but only if it's optional. I wouldn't like the time to be there always.

Originally Posted by sbaylor

The iPhone version is still on schedule as announced two months ago. It is coming soon by the end of this quarter (i.e., before June 30, 2016).

Great! Thanks! Looking forward to having BookMaster on my iPhone, especially now that it can sync with my iPad

[gwynevans]

Originally Posted by sbaylor

Thank you for your suggestion and describing the usage scenario. Anyone else seconded?

(Another user who's switched from Marvin here, btw.)

I'd like to have the option to display the time when reading, but only at the level of "it'd be nice" rather than "major feature I desire", if that helps!

[MSWallack]

So here is a "big" ask (that I recognize may be impossible given how iOS works). I've been using Marvin. And I have a lot of books in Marvin. One of my hesitations to moving to Bookmaster completely is the effort to move my library from Marvin to Bookmaster. So... Some sort of method by which a Marvin library could be easily imported into Bookmaster would be a great addition.

[Marsu - Jerry]

Hello, I've just switched from Marvin to Bookmaster last week.

I have a question about the PC upload feature. During a continuous use of the PC upload feature, the program warns against duplication. However, when I close the webpage and reopen it, there is no warning against duplication of the previous uploads.

Is there anyway to avoid duplication when adding books to PC upload? Or is there another way to add books my library to Bookmaster that is 100% guaranteed against duplication?

Thank you.

[gwynevans]

Originally Posted by MSWallack

. And I have a lot of books in Marvin.

How many (roughly) is 'a lot'? I imported on the order of 1000 by saving from Calibre into a single folder then using the PC Upload feature, but while that went fine, I've no idea how it would scale up.

[sbaylor]

Originally Posted by Marsu - Jerry

Hello, I've just switched from Marvin to Bookmaster last week.

It's really great for our team to hear this kind of message!

I have a question about the PC upload feature. During a continuous use of the PC upload feature, the program warns against duplication. However, when I close the webpage and reopen it, there is no warning against duplication of the previous uploads.

Is there anyway to avoid duplication when adding books to PC upload? Or is there another way to add books my library to Bookmaster that is 100% guaranteed against duplication?

Thank you.

This is a good question.

The short answer is that no matter how you add (import) books to BookMaster Library, there is guaranteed to be no duplication of books by design. This guarantee holds whether you add books via iTunes, OPDS catalog, websites, calibre, PC Upload, or from BookMaster SE running in Server mode on another device. This guarantee holds as usual, even if you change the title, author, tags, etc., of the books. Before a new book is properly admitted to the Library, its file content (vs. filename) is checked for duplication against all books in the Library. All these duplication checks happen on the iPad.

Now more details for those who are interested:

Try downloading the same book twice from the same website, and you should see that in the (Exchange) Queue View the second download is marked with the status [Duplicated].

In the case of PC Upload, we can run some additional pre-screening duplication check on the PC (vs. iPad) via the browser.
During the same session of PC Upload, if you try to upload the same file more than once, you'll see the following message:
"A file with the same name has been uploaded.
To upload the file again, refresh this webpage first."
Thus, unless you refresh the webpage (or equivalently, close and re-open the browser), the same file won't be uploaded twice.

But why even bother to suggest and allow a way in the browser message to upload a file with the same name as one that has been uploaded in the same session before? Well, two files can have exactly the same name if they are dragged from two different folders on your PC, even though they have different contents!

Hmm, so checking for duplicated filenames is just a good heuristic to guard against accidentally dropping the same files more than once and thus saving the time to re-transfer the same files unnecessarily. By now you can see that even if this pre-screening check is skipped, it will not cause any book duplication problem.

Hope this will give you more confidence in our guarantee of no book duplication.

[Marsu - Jerry]

Thank you sbaylor for explaining.

Perhaps I did not explain clearly before (sorry, English is my second language). Could you please help me a little more?

What I meant is accidental duplication. I have a lot of books in my PC. The first session, I only loaded a few hundreds. However, I forgot to note the last book uploaded (I think I stopped at N). That's why a few days later, when I tried to upload the rest, to be sure, I back up a little bit, to M.

When all are uploaded, I start reading, and then I found one or two duplications. I'm sure there must be more, but I tried to ask before I start searching for them manually.

Once the duplications are in Bookmaster in my iPad, it's very hard to locate all of them and delete them manually.

Is there a better way to do this except manually? What if in the future I load a book already in Bookmaster? What can I do to detect duplications?

Thank you.

[MSWallack]

My "lot" sounds like yours, gwynevans (if you multiply by about 3).

I'll have to look into the PC Upload feature to see how that works.

[sbaylor]

I see. Thank you for describing your usage scenario in more details for my understanding of your question.

I think what you see is the problem of "pseudo duplicates". Two files are pseudo duplicates if they look like the same but are not really (bit-by-bit) the same.

For example, on my Mac computer, I have 3 files (located in different folders) named identically as aaiw.epub (shorthand for "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland") but with different contents (mainly due to differences in CSS and embedded images). These 3 files are pseudo duplicates, and NOT true duplicates. Therefore, I fully expect them to be imported into BookMaster Library as 3 EPUB books, all with the same title and same author.

However, if I try to import any one of the 3 files again, it will be flagged as a duplicate this time, as they already exist in the Library.

You may say, "Well, I understand now that they are just pseudo duplicates. But how can I delete the pseudo duplicates from the app?"

How do you know they ARE pseudo duplicates in the first place?

You may arrange by Title (or Author) in Flat List View and notice that the pseudo duplicates appear on adjacent rows. Just delete the ones you want (by swiping on the row, etc.). Isn't that simple enough?

Side note:
It seems that this pseudo-duplicate problem originates from the original files stored on your PC, and you seem to think that the way PC Upload checks filename duplication is a good filter. Well, in that case, you can simulate the check without using PC Upload. Just create a new folder, and then copy all relevant files from other folders into this new folder. Your Windows or Mac OS will then warn you for files with duplicated names. The OS will not tolerate two files with the same name to live in the same folder. It will either reject the copy or rename some files.

Originally Posted by Marsu - Jerry

Thank you sbaylor for explaining.

Perhaps I did not explain clearly before (sorry, English is my second language). Could you please help me a little more?

What I meant is accidental duplication. I have a lot of books in my PC. The first session, I only loaded a few hundreds. However, I forgot to note the last book uploaded (I think I stopped at N). That's why a few days later, when I tried to upload the rest, to be sure, I back up a little bit, to M.

When all are uploaded, I start reading, and then I found one or two duplications. I'm sure there must be more, but I tried to ask before I start searching for them manually.

Once the duplications are in Bookmaster in my iPad, it's very hard to locate all of them and delete them manually.

Is there a better way to do this except manually? What if in the future I load a book already in Bookmaster? What can I do to detect duplications?

Thank you.

[sbaylor]

Originally Posted by MSWallack

So here is a "big" ask (that I recognize may be impossible given how iOS works). I've been using Marvin. And I have a lot of books in Marvin. One of my hesitations to moving to Bookmaster completely is the effort to move my library from Marvin to Bookmaster. So... Some sort of method by which a Marvin library could be easily imported into Bookmaster would be a great addition.

It seems that migrating the books themselves from Marvin to BookMaster is relatively easy, but migrating the attached notes and bookmarks is difficult. Since you did emphasize that you have a lot of (~3000) books, but did not say anything about notes or bookmarks, I assume that you are mostly concerned about the books themselves.

As there are so many ways to import books into BookMaster as discussed in post #127, the question really boils down how easy it is to get the book EPUB files out of Marvin.

As I've just verified again, the latest version of Marvin (released Aug, 2015) still works with iTunes File Sharing. Transferring 3000 books is going to take some time, but the process itself is really simple, isn't it?

Perhaps what you really ask for is a method that can somehow directly transfer the book files from some Marvin directory to some BookMaster directory, thus saving you the round-trip copying from Marvin to PC and then back to BookMaster via iTunes (or Dropbox, which will take even longer time).

This kind of method would be possible if both Marvin and BookMaster were built to cooperate like that. In general, this kind of method won't work, as it is not supposed to work due to restriction of the app sandbox security model enforced by iOS.

After all, it seems that getting the book files out of Marvin the simple usual way is the way to go. Saving your files on your PC as a backup is usually a good practice in the first place.

[rfog]

I would like to give some experienced advice about notes and bookmarks.

Short answer: don't use the app you are using to read. Use other services like Evernote/OneNote, or Apple Notes, or whatever.

Long answer: I like a lot this program but it lacks two very important things (for me, of course): no iPhone app and position sync is done manually.

The last one is an absolute no-go. ¿Why? Because if I forgot to manually sync the position (that happens almost always), when I go to my other devices, they are not synced. That is the reason I commented before that at least sync position must be automatic, at least when closing the book/app.

(Other collateral thing in relation to manual sync, that is covered by the book "Why software sucks?" by David Platt, is the list of actions to do before and after sync: to do the sync it asks *twice* after selecting the option. Oh, man, I had the will to press a button. Do it, and if I've mistaken, give me an "undo" button. Please, please, do a usability study. People usually is not stupid).

Sorry for the interruption. If I don't write it I will die of disease.

Why don't use the app annotation system? Because the problems currently in discussion. Nothing lasts forever, and apps less. You are comfortable using Marvin/BookMaster/uRead/Whatever and suddenly discover other better application, or your current app developer finds the love and stops making apps, or you get tired of iOS/Android/Windows and want to switch (perhaps other day I will talk about the Golden Jail with Pixie Dust).

Then you will discover you have read a zillion books with X app, another Zillion of bookmarks in Safari, have two zillions and half of notes and a scrapbook in Whatever app of about three thousand terabytes of data... And cannot change because that.

(As a side effect: don't use the app for your book repository. The reasons to not do this are the same explained here).

Please, don't enter in the Golden Jail with Pixie Dust.

What I do? In relation to books, I export my notes to Evernote. Doesn't matter if I'm reading in BookMaster (not since it lost the position of one of my books), Marvin, Hyphen, iBooks or Kindle (eInk and Apps). If I'm reading in an app, I directly export the annotation. If I'm reading with my Kindle Voyage, once read the book, I open the annotation text file copy and paste into an Evernote note.

Now I have a lot of little notes in Evernote. I can select all for the book I've read, merge into one big note and move to my "Reading Notes" Notebook, even with keywords. Muy notes are all in the same place, keyworded, with the same format and never will be lost.

When reading old dead tree books (btw I *still* read a lot of these) I used to annotate them with pencil and sometimes with color pencils (each time you write with a ballpen in a book, God kills a little kitten) . Now I take a photo of the part of the page, reference and annotate it and send to... Yes: Evernote.

I use Evernote, but you can use whatever application you want. But insert in your mind the phrase "never in the Golden Jail with Pixie Dust": have a path to recover your notes in a more or less standard format. Evernote exports to standard XML format. My scrapbook is GoodNotes that syncs across devices and can export to standard vector PDF. My PDF reading tool is GoodReader, that uses the standard PDF annotation system and can maintain a synced list of files with a server...

I'm not recommending apps here, I'm telling you the ones I use that have a big "Golden Jail with Pixie Dust Exit Door".

[mystika1]

Hi,
I have a quick question about book master se. Does the app have what I call "extra dimming" where you can dim the screen brightness lower than the device does?

Thanks,

Penny

[MSWallack]

I'm not a big user of bookmarks or notes, so that isn't a worry. As sbaylor correctly guessed, my real concern is moving the books (preserving metadata) in the simplest way possible. So I'll have to play around with the iTunes method (I've avoided using iTunes for all sorts of reasons) to see what I can achieve.

[sbaylor]

Originally Posted by MSWallack

I'm not a big user of bookmarks or notes, so that isn't a worry. As sbaylor correctly guessed, my real concern is moving the books (preserving metadata) in the simplest way possible. So I'll have to play around with the iTunes method (I've avoided using iTunes for all sorts of reasons) to see what I can achieve.

An alternative to iTunes is a third-party free app called iFunBox. It works on Mac and Windows. Personally, I've found it more convenient for the purpose of "File Sharing".

Disclaimer: iFunBox is neither affiliated with nor recommended by Maplepop LLC. If iFunBox does not work as well as iTunes in terms of File Sharing, it is solely iFunBox's problem.