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Old 08-28-2022, 04:39 PM   #1
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Lightbulb Best cross-platform e-reader: BookFusion?

Hi all,

I'm a cross-platform fanatic. I regularly read e-books on my 3 iPads (all 3 common sizes), on my 4 Android tablets (4 various sizes & shapes from 8 to 14 inches), and on my Android phone. I process my highlights and annotations (I heavily annotate the books I read) on my Windows computers. (I used to be an iPhone and Mac user in the past, but I ditched them both years ago, Apple software being so insufferably dumb and limiting; I can just barely tolerate it on the 3 iPads, running in the background.)

So you can guess my struggles: what would be the best e-reader for me, given my everyday cross-platform use?

Brief answer: the situation is pretty dire. But there may be some hope on the horizon.

The best e-reader on Android, to me, is Moon+ Reader Pro, hands down. It's far from perfect, so that I would rate it only 4 stars out of 5, but I'm afraid there's nothing better. I like ReadEra and some others, but Moon is the best of the bunch. My issue, though, is that it's Android-only, although it makes it possible to export annotations to the PC, in a crude and heavy-handed fashion.

The best e-reader on iPad/iPhone, to me, is Marvin, although I like a few others, too, such as MapleRead, but Marvin is still the best of them, I'd say, despite being abandonware for years now, unfortunately. Marvin's fundamental flaw is that it does not even offer annotations syncing among iOS devices (!), let alone cross-platform syncing. I would therefore rate it 3˝ out of 5 stars. But, at the very least, export of Marvin annotations to the PC is possible – once again, in a crude and heavy-handed fashion, just like in Moon.

(I remember that while Marvin was still in development, Kris, its developer, approached the Taiwanese gentleman, the Moon developer, to try and develop a common cross-platform syncing solution between Marvin and Moon, which would be just fabulous, but nothing came out of it. I think there may be a severe language barrier – the Taiwanese developer, despite being a really nice and forthcoming person by all accounts, is not overly communicative when it comes to advanced feature requests like these.)

So, as you can see, I'm really struggling. Whenever I read an e-book, I need to export annotations from it separately from Android and the iPads (separately for each of the 3 iPads, in fact, due to Marvin's failure to provide any syncing at all), and then I need to collate those annotations manually on a Windows PC. It's a hassle and a chore!

Now, you might ask: what about Kindle or Google Play Books? Don't they offer exactly what you're asking for out of the box?

Nope, unfortunately. They're both too dumb, too crude, too elementary – just as you'd expect corporate software to be. Corporate software caters to the masses and sneers at power users who demand advanced functionality – especially customizability. (See Apple software which is the epitome of despising power users and their customizability needs.)

Quite apart from that, Kindle and Play Books are simply unusable for my needs, period.

Why? Because so far, we've only mentioned EPUB books. Yet many books I need to read are only available as PDF files. (Nope, automatic converters from PDF to EPUB never work properly; you might just as well stay in PDF.) Worse still: some books are only available in photographed (scanned) PDF files, containing zero actual text (just images of text; and again, automatic OCR conversion to text-based PDF files never works properly – you might just as well stay with the image-based PDF file). In fact, I often need to photograph a printed book manually if it's one that is otherwise unavailable – the result is an imaged-based PDF file, not a text-based PDF file.

And, in case you didn't know, neither Kindle nor Google Play Books support any annotating of image-based PDF files at all. The only way to annotate image-based PDF files is via freehand drawing, which neither Kindle nor Play Books support, and so, Kindle and Play Books can't be used by me, even if I were to tolerate how generally dumb and limiting they are.

There is some elementary and very crude support of freehand annotations of image-based PDF files in Moon+ Reader Pro on Android, but it's nothing to write home about. As to Marvin, it doesn't even support opening PDF files.

And so, for reading those image-based PDF files, I need to resort to a third piece of e-reader software: Adobe Acrobat. Its cross-platform functionality, in terms of (not only) those freehand annotations, appears to be rock-solid. Of course, it's corporate software, so yes: it's obtuse, it's dumb, it's limiting, unintelligent, unwieldy and heavy-handed – what else can you expect from corporate software? But at least it works reliably.

For many years, for reading PDF files, I used to prefer GoodReader on iOS and Xodo on Android, because unlike Adobe Acrobat, they are neither unwieldy nor dumb. However, both GoodReader and Xodo have major issues with syncing those freehand annotations, even leading to pretty frequent data loss (I use Dropbox for syncing), and so, regrettably, I had to ditch both GoodReader and Xodo.

So, is there really no single cross-platform app that would satisfy all my e-reading needs?

Well, perhaps there's some hope on the horizon. I've recently become aware of the cross-platform e-reader BookFusion, and I've been giving it a test drive on all 3 platforms (iPads, Android, web/Windows).

It's not "there" yet by any means (Moon+ Reader Pro is currently still clearly better on Android, and Marvin or MapleRead are currently still clearly better on iOS), but it certainly appears to be moving in the right direction! For one thing, it has those lofty cross-platform ambitions that Moon Reader or Marvin never even aspired to.

The free plan in BookFusion is fairly limiting, and anyway, I can't possibly use BookFusion as my only e-reader at this point. There are several showstoppers for me – the main being, just like in Kindle and Google Play Books, the inability to annotate image-based PDF files via freehand drawing. But whereas I have zero hope that Kindle or Play Books will ever implement this feature (they are corporate software, after all, and so they despise users who ask for advanced features and customizability; they couldn't care less about them, because power users always only constitute a tiny proportion of their gigantic user base!), I do trust that it's possible for BookFusion to implement this crucial missing feature (and others) at a future point that is not all too distant.

I was surprised and delighted, however, that there is one feature where BookFusion, even at this rather early point in its development, excels over all the other e-reader apps. So, in fact, I do use BookFusion as my main e-reader (on both Android and iPads) for one of the books I'm currently reading. (I used to say, "I always read 7 books simultaneously", but nowadays, it's truer to say "I always read at least 12 books simultaneously".)

You see, one of the 12+ books I'm currently reading is a bilingual book. I purchased a printed copy of it years ago – but I stopped reading all printed books way back in 2010 when Steve invented the iPads, and I've only been reading e-books since. So, I also got an electronic copy of this bilingual book (French & English – for learners of French, and I am one).

In the printed book, everything is 100% neat and clear: original French text on the left – translated English text on the right.

No matter which e-book app I initially tried, on any platform – the electronic version of this bilingual book is pretty much messed up. Still readable, but messed up and disorganized. No matter how much I experimented with adjusting the font size, double-column width, etc. – the result in the electronic copy of that book never was the same as in the printed version: French on the left, English on the right. Moon+ Reader Pro, Marvin, ReadEra, MapleRead, Kindle, Play Books (you name it...) – all have failed in this regard.

Well, but here comes BookFusion! It seems like miracle, but BookFusion, as the only e-reader app I tested, manages to display this bilingual book just as neatly in its electronic copy as in the printed version: it consistently displays French on the left, and English on the right. In Android, in iOS, in Windows (on the web). There must be some special coding within the e-book that all other e-reader apps choose to ignore, but BookFusion does respect. Here's a screenshot from BookFusion:

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Before I found BookFusion, I was forced to resort to pretty desparate measures: using two various apps side-by-side (Moon & BookEra on Android; Marvin and its clone Marvin SxS on iPads), just to somehow manipulate the text so that I can see French on the left, English on the right.

See my tweet from back in July on this. Among other things, the screenshots there prove that e-books do look a lot better in Moon+ Reader and in Marvin than they currently do in BookFusion... But in this instance, functionality trumps looks for me (because as soon as you flip a page in Moon or Marvin, all the French & English gets mixed up – unlike in BookFusion), and so I switched to BookFusion for good, for reading this particular bilingual book.

As a token of my gratitude, I subscribed to BookFusion's lowest paid annual plan (around €19), even though I'll probably only be using BookFusion to read this particular bilingual book and nothing else, which would be perfectly possible in the free version as well. In a year from now, I'll reconsider my subscription – if BookFusion makes substantial progress within the next 12 months, I'll be happy to prolong. I do believe developers should be rewarded for their efforts, and if the day comes when BookFusion satisfies all my reading needs, I would subscribe to their top paid plan (currently $96 annually) without blinking an eye.

I think the BookFusion developer is lurking somewhere around these MobileRead forums, and I hope my feedback from this post will be useful for him. To make it even more useful, in a later post in this thread, I'll be specifically listing all the showstoppers but also lesser deficiencies that currently make it impossible for me to consider BookFusion my main (let alone my only) e-reader.

If anyone reading this has other recommendations for quality cross-platform e-reader apps, do post them here! Or, if you have any specific experience with BookFusion – any pitfalls there that I, as a novice user, may not have discovered at this point?

Last edited by Faterson; 08-28-2022 at 05:02 PM.
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Old 08-29-2022, 04:14 AM   #2
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Steve didn't invent the iPad.
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Old 08-29-2022, 04:36 AM   #3
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How can you say Moon Reader Pro is any good? It doesn't respect the CSS well enough to be anything but garbage.
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Old 08-29-2022, 05:12 AM   #4
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Steve didn't invent the iPad.
How so? You're the first person I've ever heard to make an outrageous statement like that.

(And nope, I'm not interested in dissecting internal Apple wars. Steve Jobs was a barbarian when it comes to software – hence, Apple software is typically atrocious, and an offence to human intelligence. But Steve did have the nose for hardware innovations, and I'll be forever grateful to him for that.

I used to suffer chronic back pains up until the invention of iPads in 2010, having typically done all my e-book reading on a notebook screen while sitting in a regular office chair.

As soon as the iPads were invented, I was able to start using them as one would typically use a printed book. Go to bed with it, etc. Back pains were gone! Thank you again, Steve.)
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Old 08-29-2022, 05:24 AM   #5
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How can you say Moon Reader Pro is any good? It doesn't respect the CSS well enough to be anything but garbage.
Moon+ Reader Pro is superb. But still only 4 out of 5 stars for me. I don't care about the minutiae of CSS, Jon. Yup, Moon reinterprets it in its own way, but what counts to me is the result. I mean, look at that tweet of mine I linked before. The first screenshot there, on the left, is Moon+ Reader Pro. That's absolutely beautiful! More beautiful than Marvin. In no other e-reader I know of do e-books look as nice as in Moon+ Reader. I haven't yet encountered an e-book, Jon, where Moon's reinterpretation/"disregard" of CSS would make it unreadable for me, or that it would disfigure the e-book so as to make it unpalatable. As you perhaps remember, Jon, unlike you, I don't care about "publisher settings" in the least – I typically override all of them anyway. So, I'm perfectly fine with Moon's display of e-books.

Moon's biggest weaknesses, to me (apart from the cardinal weakness of being Android-only), are its sloppy export of annotations (which is equally sloppy in Marvin), and Moon is weaker than Marvin in terms of customization of headers and footers of e-books. In fact, there's practically zero option for customizing them in Moon, whereas Marvin is fabulous in this regard – I remember how hard Kris worked on making headers and footers fully customizable in Marvin.

When it comes to annotations export in BookFusion, it's slightly better than in Marvin or Moon, but still bad enough at this point – not professional-grade. I'll be posting details on that and other BookFusion deficiencies I've discovered later on in this thread.
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Old 08-29-2022, 05:37 AM   #6
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The iPad is a tablet. It was not the first tablet ever made. Just like Apple took the idea for a GUI OS from Xerox.

A lot of stuff from Apple were done by others first.
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Old 08-29-2022, 05:40 AM   #7
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Yeah, iPad was just the first truly usable tablet. And Stanza had a lot to do with it. Stanza was fine on the tiny iPhone screen, but it really only came to life on the big iPad screen.

I'd been a user of handheld devices prior to 2010 (including the hardware Kindles), but it was only the invention of iPads that made it possible for me to stop reading printed books once and for all. I've only been reading e-books since the summer of 2010. (And I got the first iPad on the first day it went on sale next door from here, in Vienna, in the summer of 2010.)

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Old 08-29-2022, 05:53 AM   #8
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Stanza was and always will be truly awful.

For a program that displays eBooks to be good, it has to respect CSS. That leaves out programs such as Moon Reader, FBReader, Stanza, etc.
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Old 08-29-2022, 06:18 AM   #9
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For what it's worth, I've found Moon Reader to be the best ereading app for Android. It respects my hand-edited css enough for those rare instances I read on my phone. I don't care about annotating and disable headers/footers, and most of the time I read on my eink readers anyway.

I could never read books on an iPad or another tablet, too heavy and uncomfortable. Eink is what works for me and has worked since 2011. I mostly stopped reading paper books back then too.
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Old 08-29-2022, 06:46 AM   #10
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I don't care about annotating
That explains your satisfaction with e-ink. As you know, annotating in e-ink is an ordeal, which is why the arrival of hardware Kindles wasn't enough for me to abandon printed books. Only iPad with Stanza on it accomplished that for me.

There's nothing wrong with never annotating books. But I at least hope that you (unlike that berserk crowd of blinded enraged Marvin fanboys) will admit that annotations are a crucial feature for many other readers whose needs happen to be different from yours.

Among other things, I get paid for proofreading books, so it's obvious I need that feature to be professionally reliable. That's why I had to switch to Adobe Acrobat for PDFs, even though it's corporate software, and therefore dumb – but at least there's no data loss, which is a big no-no for someone who's earning money by proofreading books.

Potential data loss is also something I worry about in BookFusion. BookFusion offers its own in-house syncing solution (its own cloud to store the annotations, to make them accessible on all 3 platforms: iOS + Android + web/Windows, Mac, Linux...), which is great, but not secure enough for me. What if BookFusion's cloud server goes down one day?

Therefore, one of the suggestions I'll be submitting to the BookFusion developer in this thread is to implement, say, Dropbox backups in BookFusion, in addition to BookFusion's in-house backup solution.

I love how GoodReader for iOS does that: you push a single button, and your entire folder of books currently being read gets backed up to Dropbox or Google Drive. That's something BookFusion might offer as well – then I could rest at ease that my data is secure. (GoodReader does it well on principle, but in practice, its particular backup method leads to pretty frequent data loss in Dropbox, so I had to ditch GoodReader for Adobe Acrobat.)

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disable headers/footers
Oh, it's not about disabling headers/footers for me at all!

Sure, one of the available options should be to make them go away completely if that's what the reader prefers, but that's my point: headers & footers should be completely customizable in any way the reader likes it.

Marvin is absolutely terrific in this regard, with no other e-reader even coming close. And, as mentioned, I remember how extremely hard Kris worked to make all of it possible in Marvin. It's been worth it.

You can take a closer look at the second screenshot on the left in that tweet of mine, to see how I set up my headers and footers in Marvin. I expect nothing less from BookFusion, if it's to replace Marvin for me in future.

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I could never read books on an iPad or another tablet, too heavy and uncomfortable.
I disagree. What's "heavy" about the iPad mini, for example? "Light as a feather", if you ask me. That's like saying "printed books are too heavy for me".

Everyone's mileage may vary, of course. I regularly use even my 13-inch iPad Pro and the new 14-inch Samsung Tab S8 Ultra to read e-books, and I don't even find those too heavy.

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Old 08-29-2022, 07:13 AM   #11
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I disagree. What's "heavy" about the iPad mini, for example? "Light as a feather", if you ask me. That's like saying "printed books are too heavy for me".

Everyone's mileage may vary, of course. I regularly use even my 13-inch iPad Pro and the new 14-inch Samsung Tab S8 Ultra to read e-books, and I don't even find those too heavy.
Yep, hardcovers were too heavy for me, often even trade paperbacks, which is why I usually bought mass market paperbacks.

iPad mini weighs about 290g, which is way too heavy for one-handed reading (and that's how I always read). The Kobo Sage is my heaviest ereader at the moment, 240g, and that's the most I can tolerate for long reading sessions.

As to annotations, of course there are many who need them. Unfortunately I know next to nothing about annotation features of various apps, having never used them. You can make annotations with a pen on the Kobo Sage and export them, but again, I have no idea how that compares to other apps and programs.
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Old 08-29-2022, 07:32 AM   #12
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iPad mini weighs about 290g, which is way too heavy for one-handed reading
Not here, I assure you. (I must have particularly muscular hands, both left & right?)

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You can make annotations with a pen on the Kobo Sage and export them, but again, I have no idea how that compares to other apps and programs.
It wouldn't be enough for my needs... not even close.

As I mentioned a bit earlier somewhere, it's crucial for an e-reader to offer multiple-color highlights. BookFusion has only very recently added this core annotating feature, apparently (iOS & web so far).

On a black-and-white e-ink reader, you've got to forget about multiple-color highlights, of course, which pretty much excludes all e-ink readers from consideration for me. Yeah, even colored e-ink readers, because e-ink is just painfully slow for typing – and I not only use highlights, but frequently also comment on them extensively.

So extensively, in fact, that sometimes I don't type (or scribble) anything at all, but instead I dictate my annotation on the relevant passage. I sometimes dictate for 5 to 10 minutes straight, if I feel the need to argue with some (typically dead) writer!

An ideal e-reader would be one that would make it possible to record voice annotations in addition to typed/scribbled ones, but that's perhaps asking too much. (Although a few e-readers do support voice annotations.) I'm OK with dictating my voice annotation into Dropbox, then linking it back to the book I'm reading via an URL – although that does slow me down considerably every time.

I respect Kobo, by the way. A really solid brand, and I used to own a couple of Kobo e-ink readers. I liked them more than the Kindles for sure.

Ditto for PocketBook. I in fact currently own a PocketBook e-ink reader, and it's really fine, better than a Kindle, but I just don't use it that much, given my annotation needs.

But a friend of mine has just emailed me in response to this thread, pointing out that PocketBook is likewise a potentially good cross-platform solution. There are apparently not only PocketBook apps for iOS and Android, but also a web app. So, a nice competitor for BookFusion. At the same time, the friend warns me that he's been encountering pretty severe issues with the display of some e-books in PocketBook lately, so for those, he needs to revert to Google Play Books.

Last edited by Faterson; 08-29-2022 at 07:46 AM.
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Old 08-29-2022, 08:32 AM   #13
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Yeah, iPad was just the first truly usable tablet.
No. Nothing like. Also a walled garden.
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Old 08-29-2022, 06:03 PM   #14
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Old 08-30-2022, 01:01 AM   #15
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Moon+ Reader Pro is superb. But still only 4 out of 5 stars for me. I don't care about the minutiae of CSS, Jon. Yup, Moon reinterprets it in its own way, but what counts to me is the result. I mean, look at that tweet of mine I linked before. The first screenshot there, on the left, is Moon+ Reader Pro. That's absolutely beautiful! More beautiful than Marvin. In no other e-reader I know of do e-books look as nice as in Moon+ Reader. I haven't yet encountered an e-book, Jon, where Moon's reinterpretation/"disregard" of CSS would make it unreadable for me, or that it would disfigure the e-book so as to make it unpalatable. As you perhaps remember, Jon, unlike you, I don't care about "publisher settings" in the least – I typically override all of them anyway. So, I'm perfectly fine with Moon's display of e-books.
Sorry but I agree with Jon. Unless you dig into it's menus, Moon+ Reader does not respect the CSS. I read several books where Moon+'s display of the page was pathetic. Even when publisher CSS is enabled, it does not handle most ePub3 features. Then we have issues with fixed layout ePubs. Again Moon+'s rendering is total crap.

While I admit my personal choices in CSS tend to be on the vanilla side, Moon+ takes that too far for me to say it earns more that 2 stars.

Last edited by DNSB; 08-30-2022 at 05:07 PM.
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