Best cross-platform e-reader: BookFusion?

[PeterT]

I don't mean to be argumentative but surely this discussion would be far better suited to another location; not "Which one should I buy?".

Possibly "Reading and Management".

Sent from my Pixel 4a using Tapatalk

[skillachie]

@Faterson

Thank you for taking the time to share these screenshots and provide such a long and detailed post.

However, here we already begin seeing some of the current deficiencies of BookFusion on Android when compared to BookFusion on iOS. (I know it's only temporary.) For now, BookFusion on Android doesn't support paragraph alignment (no "justify paragraphs" is possible). Of course, that's elementary functionality. It was only added to BookFusion for iOS a few weeks ago, so I'm sure it will be added on Android as well.

Another deficiency is the inability to load custom fonts in BookFusion. I really like only two fonts currently offered by BookFusion: Bookerly and Volkhov.

Yeah, all the other BookFusion fonts are usable as well, but I just don't find them all that attractive.

This is and always will be entirely subjective. App developers can never oblige everyone's tastes in terms of fonts, so really the only proper way to deal with this is to enable custom fonts.

Yes, those features will make their way to Android later this year.

One thing we do not do currently is support custom fonts as you said. However, we plan to look at adding this. Do you use any other fonts besides Libre Baskerville? Just curious

You can also see the very nice footer offered by Moon+ Reader, whereas in BookFusion, there is no footer and header at all, as you read your book. In BookFusion, you need to tap the center of the screen, and only then, headers and footers appear. But unlike in Marvin, they are not customizable in any way. So, when it comes to headers and footers, there is huge space for improvement for BookFusion.

You can read and keep the headers and footers active by just skipping between the pages but when you tap it will remove both the header and the footer.

You are right that they are not currently customizable. Out of the list of items we might look at this one last to make it customizable. We will be adding items such as estimated time remaining, chapters and so on in the footer before looking at making it customizable

To sum it up, @skillachie, I don't think any major fixes need to be performed for BookFusion in order for it to be usable on a black-and-white e-ink device. I believe BookFusion on e-ink is just fine as it is now. Any issues I have observed are issues with the Android app, and have nothing to do with the black-and-white e-ink screen.

Maybe, if you could create an exclusive "Snow White" theme for BookFusion, that would probably be appreciated by e-ink users. Because any dark interface element tends to look awful on an e-ink screen. But even without such a "Snow White" theme, BookFusion is perfectly usable on e-ink as it is now.

This is great to hear which means we will be able to officially support Android e-inks much sooner. That was our thought as well that the themes might need to be tweaked , also disabling all animations and making other optimizations

Here, though, is another nasty Android bug, @skillachie, I discovered in BookFusion while testing it on the e-ink reader: when you open a PDF file in BookFusion for Android, it resets the fonts in all of your EPUB books (!) back to the default font, which is, naturally, ugly. It makes no sense for this to be happening, but it does happen – on Android. This nasty bug doesn't exist in BookFusion for iOS and for the web.

Interesting, we will try to replicate this and have it resolved. Thanks for reporting.

Some other Android bugs I noticed earlier were rearing their ugly heads on e-ink also. For example, you open a book, read it for a bit, yet it fails to appear in the upper You're Reading section. Once again, it's only a bug occurring in Android; iOS and web are fine.

We will have this resolved.

We will investigate and post back once we push a release with these two bugs fixes.

Therefore, @skillachie, it would be great if you could enable these various types of underline in BookFusion as well, and they can then, on black-and-white e-ink devices, nicely provide the functionality typically provided by highlight colors on color-enabled screens.

To be honest, we were planning to add just a single underline but the above makes sense for e-ink devices.


Thanks again for taking the time to get back. Updates are much faster in iOS but they are all coming to Android as well

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by PeterT

I don't mean to be argumentative but surely this discussion would be far better suited to another location; not "Which one should I buy?".

Possibly "Reading and Management".

It's debatable. I thought really hard, when launching this thread, about in which MobileRead section to place it, and finally decided for this one.

If a moderator moves it to a different section, I'll be OK with it, of course, but I'm afraid there's no optimal solution.

If I were permitted to suggest a reorganization of MobileRead sections to make them more logical, my suggestion would be this:

E-BOOK GENERAL
...

E-BOOK READERS [HARDWARE ONLY!]
...

E-BOOK SOFTWARE
prominent software no. 1
prominent software no. 2
prominent software no. 3
prominent software no. 4
prominent software no. 5
* CROSS-PLATFORM SOFTWARE
* ANDROID SOFTWARE
* iOS SOFTWARE
* E-INK SOFTWARE
* OTHER PLATFORMS
* LEGACY SOFTWARE
* READING AND MANAGEMENT

E-BOOK FORMATS
...

Right now, BookFusion appears to be a victim of its high and admirable ambitions.

You know, if you're Android-only e-reader software like Moon+ Reader Pro, you get discussed in the Android Devices forum subsection, although that forum section, E-Book Readers, was clearly originally intended to discuss hardware, not software.

Similarly, if you're iOS-only e-reader software like MapleRead, you get discussed in the Apple Devices forum subsection, although that forum section, E-Book Readers, was clearly originally intended to discuss hardware, not software.

But if you happen to be cross-platform e-reader software like BookFusion, there currently appears to be no ideal place to post a thread discussing it, unless the forum sections and subsections were re-organized in a similar way to what's outlined above. Then, it would be obvious that this thread would properly belong in the "E-Book Software" section and "Cross-platform software" subsection.

There is currently no such subsection here in MobileRead forums – I suppose because it's precisely so rare that a software package has the ambition to serve all platforms like BookFusion does. (I guess this underlying idea is also where the name BookFusion comes from.)

Honestly, I believe BookFusion would deserve its own forum subsection on MobileRead already, just like Calibre, Calibre Companion, KOReader, Sigil, Marvin, EPUBReader and Writer2ePub currently have it. Not sure what EPUBReader is or what it accomplished to deserve its own subsection on MobileRead, but the most recent post in that subsection is from way back in 2018 (!), so it appears to be pretty much dead by now. Marvin is iOS-only and has been abandonware for years, so it's unclear how it deserves its own subsection over BookFusion – software currently still in very active development.

Anyway, it's not really necessary for BookFusion to have its own subsection (until its user base and stature grows considerably), but I think there's no denying that the current organization of sections and subsections here on MobileRead does not make much sense, when it comes to various e-reader solutions.

As to the Reading and Management forum subsection, I did consider it, but I found its description off-putting:

Get support for tools to read e-books and to manage / collect them

Sorry, but that's just not what this is about for me at all. BookFusion, and Moon+ Reader Pro, and Marvin, are no "tools to read e-books" for me at all. Calibre or Calibre Companion are tools, but e-reader software itself is the core of anyone's e-reading experience.

So, I finally opted for the current Which one should I buy? subsection, because its description hits the nail on the head for me perfectly:

Looking for the optimal reader? Unsatisfied with all of them? Get help from our expert forum members

That's exactly it for me! Yep, that's me alright: unsatisfied with all current e-readers (both software and hardware). And I have, indeed, been "looking for the optimal reader" since the 1990s, to no avail so far.

As I've been saying repeatedly, I'm afraid that no professional-grade e-reader software exists today, in 2022, on this planet, and has never existed so far. If you know of such software, please let me know, and I'll be happy to check it out.

However, as of 2022, I believe that such software must necessarily be cross-platform. I use Android devices and my iPads on a daily basis, while processing my annotations in Windows on my PCs. There must be many people like myself. So, I consider cross-platform a non-negotiable attribute of e-reader software as of 2022.

I took a look at KOReader's user manual, for example, and I was really impressed. But because KOReader supports neither iOS nor desktop platforms, it's a no-go for me from the start, and so I didn't even bother to install it.

Also, using or not using BookFusion is very much a purchase decision. BookFusion's free tier isn't really usable (except for testing purposes, perhaps), so in order to use it meaningfully, you have to purchase a subscription. The lowest tier is very affordable ($18 per year if memory serves), but you still need to purchase it. That's another aspect that prompted me to place this thread in the Which one should I buy? section.

And I don't blame them for requiring paid subscriptions for meaningful use – we wish to avoid Marvin's fate, after all, which turned out to be financially unsustainable long-term, if only a one-off payment pricing model is used to support an app's development.

My hat's off to the gentleman from Taiwan who keeps tirelessly developing Moon+ Reader Pro for all these years despite its likewise only being supported by one-time payments, but then again, there does not seem to be much communication between Moon's developer and Moon's users. Has, for example, Moon's developer ever been active here on MobileRead? I don't think so. I believe (as I mentioned before) there's a language barrier. Plus, even if there were an effective way for users to communicate their desires to Moon's developer, it does not appear that Moon has the ambition of ever being cross-platform. And no wonder, because a single person can only do so much, and I do believe Moon+ Reader Pro is the admirable creation of a single gentleman from Taiwan (although he may be married).

Originally Posted by skillachie

We plan to make optimizations for e-ink Android based devices.

That's great! Even though not strictly necessary, as I mentioned.

Originally Posted by skillachie

This is less likely with PocketBook.

I understand. PocketBook reminds me of old Nokia – kind of "boxed in" in its own software niche.

I think it might be beneficial for PocketBook and all its users to switch to Android as their operating system eventually. I really appreciate PocketBooks in terms of their hardware, but compared to the newfangled Android-based e-ink devices, they really are limited in terms of their capabilities.

Originally Posted by skillachie

I must say #5 is basic and is already supported not sure how you missed the search icon

I apologize! I indeed missed it, on all 3 platforms, despite having searched (haha!) for it.

I've been using Moon+ Reader Pro and Marvin to read my e-books for many years now, and in both of these, search within books is available when you tap and hold anywhere inside the book text. (In Moon, search is typically also available in the bottom toolbar.) Seeing no search option pop up in BookFusion's context menu, I assumed that no search in BookFusion was available. It just didn't occur to me to look for the search icon in the top-left corner of the screen. Sorry about that!

I have now removed that (non-)issue from my list of BookFusion issues/feature requests, so the list is now back to 14 items.

Originally Posted by skillachie

book files information - You can see the file size, file type from this list from just the book cover.

Not really, @skillachie, I'm afraid. You only see that information before you download a book to your library. Once you download it, no information on file size is available anywhere in BookFusion. (If I'm missing something again, please let me know.)

Originally Posted by skillachie

the estimated time to read

If you do implement this feature later on (not strictly necessary, as far as I'm concerned), please make sure it's dynamic, that is: based on the actual speed with which this or that BookFusion user is flipping pages in this or that book.

I believe that's how Moon+ Reader has implemented this feature, and it's great that way. So, please don't simply convert number of words to minutes. I would rather for you to not implement the feature at all than to do it in that superficial way. You know, the start of a book may be easier (faster) to read than the middle or ending of the book, and the "time to read"/"time to finish" metric should accurately reflect that, based on the speed of flipping the pages in that particular book by this or that BookFusion user at this or that particular time (while reading this or that particular section in the book: some sections/chapters may be easier/faster to read, others more difficult/slower!).

Tolstoy's War and Peace might take 40 hours for me to read (I'm generally a very slow reader, precisely because I annotate books so much), but for someone else who reads faster than myself, the estimated "time to read" for the same book might only be 30 hours.

Originally Posted by skillachie

We recently added number of pages left in chapter in the iOS app and will also add the ability to tap and change this to time left in chapter.

OK, but that's still a far cry from Marvin's ability to completely customize footers and headers to every reader's particular preferences.

Remember your commitment, @skillachie, that you wish for BookFusion to be better than Marvin and Moon+ Reader in all respects.

If that is to be true, fully customizable headers and footers should be a part of BookFusion's feature set sooner or later.

Originally Posted by skillachie

To be honest, we have never had the request to sort by file size before. How does this sorting option helps you to pick what to read next or when searching for a book?

It can absolutely be useful – for example when you're running out of storage capacity (your subscriptions are limited in terms of storage capacity, after all), so this can absolutely be useful especially (but not only) for locating large files (in all likelihood, PDF files with lots of pictures/multimedia in them), in order to perhaps delete them from one's BookFusion account, and thus free up some storage space.

Even more useful, however, I would find the option to sort books from longest to shortest (or shortest to longest), based on the number of words (and/or virtual pages) in them.

As I mentioned, @skillachie, I typically read 12+ books simultaneously, but it would be suicidal if all 12+ of them were as thick as Tolstoy's War and Peace. I always strive for a healthy mix of long and short books among the dozen.

So, indeed, the length of a book is often a crucial/primary criterion for me when I'm deciding which book I'm going to read next.

Originally Posted by skillachie

Do you use any other fonts besides Libre Baskerville? Just curious

I absolutely do! You must have missed that in one of my tremendously long posts in this thread. (And I don't blame you!)

Please look again at my post #55 in this thread, and the screenshot #6 in it (the smallest screenshot in that post). In that screenshot, I captured the 24 custom fonts I currently use in Moon+ Reader on my Onyx e-reader.

(I later added Bookerly as my custom font #25, because BookFusion reminded me of what a fine font Bookerly is. Well, at least there's something that the Kindle did right, although I think it was an independent font designer who originally created Bookerly for the Kindle platform.)

Originally Posted by skillachie

You can read and keep the headers and footers active by just skipping between the pages but when you tap it will remove both the header and the footer.

I know, but that's just no good. I'm sorry, but that's simply completely inferior to both Marvin and Moon+ Reader.

Absolutely: it should be an option for the headers and footers to go away completely, if that's what the reader prefers. Right now, BookFusion enforces this as the only option.

I prefer to keep the header and footer visible at all times, but at the same time, I'd like to be able to customize all data displayed in the footer and header.

Marvin makes this possible 100%, and it's one of the finest Marvin features. (One of the main reasons why I haven't switched to MapleRead on iOS so far, for example.)

Moon+ Reader does not make it possible at all, and it's one of the major weaknesses in Moon for me. (Even though I find the default, immutable footer in Moon very, very nice.)

Originally Posted by Faterson

Here is how KOReader and Moon+ Reader get around that obstacle: they support multiple types of underline. And that works equally well on black-and-white e-ink screens as it does on color phone and tablet screens. Single underline, double underline, dotted underline, dashed underline, strike-through and traditional highlighting – those would be 6 types of highlighters that don't rely on colors in any way.

Originally Posted by skillachie

To be honest, we were planning to add just a single underline but the above makes sense for e-ink devices.

Thank you in advance, on behalf of all e-ink users!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by skillachie

This is the exact default behavior in the iOS app.

The addition that we will add is a toggle to completely disable all publisher styles since we have observed based on other readers feedback there are books that want to enforce certain styles and we need to override those styles completely to allow for the other overrides to work.

I hope this feature is buried so deep that it's nearly impossible to find.

Please don't make BookFusion like most Android apps.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by skillachie

We plan to make optimizations for e-ink Android based devices.

Any chance you could see your way to making a version that runs on Kobo Readers?

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I hope this feature is buried so deep that it's nearly impossible to find.

I think a balanced approach would be to make it possible to override any and all publisher settings just as easily as to ensure that they are respected.

I don't think either of the two approaches should get a preferential treatment by the user interface. There is no single "correct way" of reading e-books, after all. This should be let entirely up to the reader's own preference.

To me, this (and not the medium) is perhaps the biggest difference between printed books and e-books: with printed books, publishers enforce their ideas of what a book should look like on all their readers, whereas with e-books, each of us is (at least potentially) his or her own typographer. It would be misguided to try "hiding" this prerogative of e-books in the user interface.

I remember that you worship at the altar of publisher settings, and you probably remember I enjoy overriding publisher settings mercilessly. But that's just you and me, and our personal biases should not influence BookFusion's interface, making it lean towards one or the other approach.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Any chance you could see your way to making a version that runs on Kobo Readers?

That would be fantastic, I agree! But it's probably a tall order. (See our discussion of PocketBooks above.)

As I see it, it would be nice for BookFusion to take a balanced approach towards all three primary platforms that there are nowadays: Android + iOS + web. (That is currently not the case, with Android lagging behind.)

Anything above and beyond those 3 primary platforms would be an extremely nice bonus and would exceed my expectations.

I would say that platform no. 4, in terms of priority, would be Android on e-ink. BookFusion already works that way, although it's not optimized. Perfectly usable, nonetheless.

Priority no. 5 could be the various proprietary e-ink platforms: Kobo, PocketBook, Kindle...

As I say, it's an extremely tall order, and I wouldn't blame @skillachie and his team in the least if they never really got around to implementing priorities #4 and #5.

I suppose BookFusion would need a giant subscriber base in order to provide consistent funding for such a comprehensive coverage of truly all platforms. It might happen, but... well, it sounds too optimistic perhaps.

I'm more modest in my expectations, and define "cross-platform" simply as Android + iOS + web.

E-ink in any shape or form (and we already have it in a usable form) would be a delightful bonus, but I don't consider it a must.

[skillachie]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I hope this feature is buried so deep that it's nearly impossible to find.

Please don't make BookFusion like most Android apps.

Yes, this will be under the advanced option. We do not plan to make it overly complex but just feature rich with enough flexibility to accommodate most readers.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Any chance you could see your way to making a version that runs on Kobo Readers?

Funny that you should ask. We are more likely to create a plugin or integration with Koreader since it already works on Kobo. We did some preliminary investigation and will explore further once we get to this on the roadmap.

We still have native desktop apps for OSX, Windows and Linux to do and adding embedded devices to the mix will require more resources. As a result an integration with Korereader is more likely.

[skillachie]

@Faterson

Not really, @skillachie, I'm afraid. You only see that information before you download a book to your library. Once you download it, no information on file size is available anywhere in BookFusion. (If I'm missing something again, please let me know.)

It constantly shows on the Web. But on mobile the file size information is displayed on the button. Usage showed that most readers were only concerned about the size (KB/MB/GB) before they downloaded the book but then it added very little value afterwards in the mobile app.

I guess we could look at potentially refreshing the designs at a later date to constantly show the file size. However, how is this valuable to you as a reader once the book is available on your device? To figure out which one of your books are taking up the most space and therefore remove them? I can see this as a good reason, just wondering if there are any others.

If you do implement this feature later on (not strictly necessary, as far as I'm concerned), please make sure it's dynamic, that is: based on the actual speed with which this or that BookFusion user is flipping pages in this or that book.

Got it

OK, but that's still a far cry from Marvin's ability to completely customize footers and headers to every reader's particular preferences.

Remember your commitment, @skillachie, that you wish for BookFusion to be better than Marvin and Moon+ Reader in all respects.

True but we will get there. We will first get the various features in then look at customizing these options afterwards.

It can absolutely be useful – for example when you're running out of storage capacity (your subscriptions are limited in terms of storage capacity, after all), so this can absolutely be useful especially (but not only) for locating large files (in all likelihood, PDF files with lots of pictures/multimedia in them), in order to perhaps delete them from one's BookFusion account, and thus free up some storage space.

Even more useful, however, I would find the option to sort books from longest to shortest (or shortest to longest), based on the number of words (and/or virtual pages) in them.

As I mentioned, @skillachie, I typically read 12+ books simultaneously, but it would be suicidal if all 12+ of them were as thick as Tolstoy's War and Peace. I always strive for a healthy mix of long and short books among the dozen.

So, indeed, the length of a book is often a crucial/primary criterion for me when I'm deciding which book I'm going to read next.

Thanks. This is reasonable.

I absolutely do! You must have missed that in one of my tremendously long posts in this thread. (And I don't blame you!)

Haha. Well I guess no quick win for you with this one then. We have to just allow loading custom fonts. Was considering just adding a couple more fonts in the next release that might have covered your use case as well but it appears the only solution is custom fonts.

Priority no. 5 could be the various proprietary e-ink platforms: Kobo, PocketBook, Kindle...

As I say, it's an extremely tall order, and I wouldn't blame @skillachie and his team in the least if they never really got around to implementing priorities #4 and #5.

I suppose BookFusion would need a giant subscriber base in order to provide consistent funding for such a comprehensive coverage of truly all platforms. It might happen, but... well, it sounds too optimistic perhaps.

Definitely right on your assumptions. it is something we could explore with a large number of readers that support the platform. It would be easier to explore creating a plugin for Koreader that syncs reading progress and highlights at least to start when we get there.

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by skillachie

We are more likely to create a plugin or integration with Koreader since it already works on Kobo.

That would be nice! KOReader looks very tempting (judging by its user manual), but because it supports neither iOS nor Windows, I chose not to actually install it anywhere, after browsing through its impressive user manual. Now, if KOReader cooperated with BookFusion, that would be a reason to give it a try.

Originally Posted by skillachie

We still have native desktop apps for OSX, Windows and Linux to do and adding embedded devices to the mix will require more resources. As a result an integration with Korereader is more likely.

That's interesting. I for one don't find native desktop apps to be a necessity at all. Is anyone actually reading books on a desktop machine in 2022?

So, at least for my needs, a web app, via an ordinary web browser, is perfectly enough for all my desktop needs, giving me the opportunity to process my book annotations.

Provided that the export of annotations works properly, of course – and right now, it does not: neither in BookFusion nor in any other e-reader software I have ever seen. Hopefully, BookFusion will be the world's first e-reader software to do it (annotations export) right.

Originally Posted by skillachie

It constantly shows on the Web. But on mobile the file size information is displayed on the button.

I apologize, @skillachie, I may be blind (again) here, but I can see no information about file sizes on the desktop, either.

Here is a screenshot of my primary bookshelf in BookFusion (in the finest browser there is, Vivaldi):



Can you see any information about file sizes there? I don't.

Neither does clicking any of the books/files help to get the information.

By the way, I don't think it's necessary at all for the file size info to be visible at all times. It could only be visible on demand, after tapping/clicking a book, to view detailed information about it.

However, at the same time there really should be the library sorting option "from largest to smallest file (in KB/MB)", and vice versa. Because BookFusion sells subscription plans with storage space limitations, I believe that such a sorting option is a must.

Independently from that, there should be the library sorting option of "estimated time to read" (shortest to longest, and longest to shortest), and perhaps also (less ambiguously!) "number of words" (largest to smallest, and smallest to largest). This will be tough to implement, given that some books may be stored as image-only PDF files, but even imperfect sorting results would be a huge improvement over the current situation, where we have no such sorting options whatsoever (neither file size, nor time to read, nor number of words).

Originally Posted by skillachie

how is this valuable to you as a reader [...]? To figure out which one of your books are taking up the most space and therefore remove them? I can see this as a good reason, just wondering if there are any others.

That would certainly be the main reason, but there could be others.

For example, when I start reading a book, I sometimes have access to various editions of it – say, 5 editions of the same book. To help me choose which of the 5 editions I'm actually going to read, information about file size might be useful.

Not by itself – I might first wish to browse through each of the 5 editions, flip a few pages and quickly skim a few chapters in each edition (such as to see how carefully or negligently the formatting in this or that edition was done), and then, giving consideration to the file size info among other aspects, I might finally choose the best edition for my needs, and delete the remaining 4 editions from my BookFusion library.

(For example, if I don't care about illustrations, I might prefer to read a text-only edition of that book; after all, illustrations/media attachments, unless they're integral part of the books' content, can make a book really bloated, and now you're suddenly starting to count in megabytes or even dozens of megabytes, instead of hundreds of kilobytes, which tends to be the standard "regular" e-book size.)

Originally Posted by skillachie

We have to just allow loading custom fonts. Was considering just adding a couple more fonts in the next release that might have covered your use case as well but it appears the only solution is custom fonts.

Absolutely!

To me, this is a no-brainer. It's going to be better for both us as BookFusion users, and for you as BookFusion developers.

You can't possibly oblige everyone's individual tastes in such a vast universe as the universe of fonts is.

I'm stunned that mega-corporations like Amazon, Apple, and Google don't make this an obvious part of their decrepit e-reader software: freely choose your own font for reading your books!

Nope: corporations are extremely skimpy, and they only give their users 5 or 6 fonts to choose from (typically).

(To me, this is evidence of implicit contempt felt by corporations towards the users of their products. They realize they don't need to work hard to keep improving their software, in order to retain their clients' favor. They know full well that they have dozens of millions of users guaranteed, by default, without their having to move a finger. The result is crappy e-reader software, as it currently dominates on this planet.)

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Faterson

I'm stunned that mega-corporations like Amazon, Apple, and Google don't make this an obvious part of their decrepit e-reader software: freely choose your own font for reading your books!

Amazon does allow sideloading custom fonts to their eink readers. As to their apps, no idea, as I don't use those.

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Amazon does allow sideloading custom fonts to their eink readers. As to their apps, no idea, as I don't use those.

That's nice to hear (I last owned an e-ink Kindle around 10 years ago, so I wouldn't know about that), but there's definitely no option for custom fonts in Kindle apps on the tablets/phones.

Other elementary user options are missing as well. (Talk about the paltry selection of 3 – three! – background colors; dumb and drab solid background colors, of course, as if textured and/or custom backgrounds didn't exist.)

I still occasionally purchase e-books via Amazon, and whenever I initially open one of those e-books in a Kindle app (before liberating it in Moon+ Reader Pro or Marvin), all I can do is and be amazed again and again at how dumb the Kindle app is, how incredibly limiting, and how proud Amazon is that the Kindle app is so dumb (just like Apple is immensely proud of how dumb and limiting their own software is; and how Adobe is ecstatic about how dumb Acrobat Reader is; and how Google is bursting with pride at how dumb their Play Books e-reader is; etc., etc.), and how happy the users are that the app they're using to read their e-books is so dumb and restricting, etc.

You know, naive novice users (and that's at least 95% of this planet's population) believe that it's natural and necessary for e-reader software to be so dumb and limiting in 2022. Because, after all, Amazon and Apple and Adobe and Google are world-famous brands, right? If this is the most that all these fabulous corporations have come up with in the realm of e-reader software, then surely nothing better is possible, right? Right?!

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Faterson

You know, naive novice users (and that's at least 95% of this planet's population) believe that it's natural and necessary for e-reader software to be so dumb and limiting in 2022. Because, after all, Amazon and Apple and Adobe and Google are world-famous brands, right? If this is the most that all these corporations have come up with in the realm of e-reader software, then surely nothing better is possible, right? Right?!

I agree with you. That's why I sold my last eink Kindle yesterday and use MoonReader those few times I happen to read on my phone. I was content with Amazon software for years when I knew no better; but not any more. Still, I expect that the vast majority of users are still comfortably ignorant. I probably would be too, if I hadn't joined MobileRead and broadened my horizons.

[skillachie]

@Faterson

Just letting you know we just did an update for iOS that added support for the following:

- Apple Pencil Support
- Quick access to the last 5 used colors
- Dedicated screen to show , filter and search all the highlights and annotations you made across all your eBooks


More details at https://www.reddit.com/r/BookFusion/...s_annotations/

BTW we are working on one of the items in your top 4 list. Guess you have to wait until 2-4 weeks to know what it is.

Random: I noticed my classification was changed from Zealot to Groupie. Does anyone have a list of these classifications/meanings and a breakdown how they get assigned

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by skillachie

Random: I noticed my classification was changed from Zealot to Groupie. Does anyone have a list of these classifications/meanings and a breakdown how they get assigned

If you click on your name in a message you wrote, you should see View public profile in the drop down. If you click on that and then on Customize profile, one of the menu items is Edit your details. Under Custom user title, you can either accept the default title for your user group and post count or set a custom title. In my case, I used that to set Bibliophagist as my title.

[skillachie]

4. custom fonts must-have

We now support custom fonts & Paragraph Spacing in the iOS app. More at https://www.reddit.com/r/BookFusion/...graph_spacing/

@Faterson You can check that one from your list. Use strikethrough when making the updates instead of deleting so others can follow

Originally Posted by DNSB

If you click on your name in a message you wrote, you should see View public profile in the drop down. If you click on that and then on Customize profile, one of the menu items is Edit your details. Under Custom user title, you can either accept the default title for your user group and post count or set a custom title. In my case, I used that to set Bibliophagist as my title.

Thank you!