Moon+Reader vs Librera

[mackeev]

My two cents:
I've been using Librera for several months now and I'm impressed by its customization and features. Tons and tons of them! I can even use custom CSS code to improve presentation of epub books. Very, very comfortable reading.
And it's under heavy development. On a daily basis, literally.

[fduniho]

Moon+Reader displays two rows of information at the bottom of the screen. The top row has time left in chapter on the left and time left in book on the right. The bottom row has the percentage of the battery left enclosed in a battery symbol and the time on the left, the chapter number, chapter title, and page count within chapter in the middle, and percentage of the book read on the right.

Librera has a single row of information at the bottom of the page. This has the time on the left, the chapter number, chapter title, and page count within the chapter in the middle, and some percentage on the right. Since it doesn't match the percentage read, but it is currently matching the percentage of battery left, I assume it is the percentage of power left in the battery.

Winner: Moon+Reader provides all the information that Librera does, and it provides additional information on reading time and percentage of the book read. In my experience using it, its estimations of time left in a chapter have been accurate.

[fduniho]

Moon+Reader is always quick. It does not make me wait to load a book or to change the font.

Librera makes me wait while it loads a book or changes the font.

Winner: Moon+Reader

[bean]

Woot, thanks for the notice of Moon+ being 50% off, bought it.

Originally Posted by HarryT

What Moon+ is extraordinarily bad at - and one might reasonably think this is a simple requirement - is simply displaying a book formatted as its publisher intended. It wants to override every bloody thing with user preferences. I want to see a book as its publisher intended it to be seen, not have every book look identical according to some set of “overrides”. This seems to be a failing of Android ePub apps in general!

I say this as a fan and user of Moon+ for several years, but HarryT's comment is spot-on, and is still correct. Moon+--and most Android reader apps in general--are indeed bad about giving you a simple working default style setting that gives you the option to use the publishers' CSS, unchanged.

In many, perhaps most ebooks I own, this is a non-issue and Moon+'s style changes are welcome, even preferable over the publisher styles. This is particularly the case with straightforward layouts, like novels, and the default styling changes by a lot of Android apps are sensible.

However there are a few books with complex layouts, for example drama involving complex character dialogs, or poetry with complex stanzas and indenting, that Moon+ just mangles and can not seem to get it right. But it's not that they 'can't do it, it's that they won't, for some inexplicable reason. Case in point, you can easily get a reader app that follows publisher CSS by default or at least lets you select that option--such as the built-in Calibre reader for PC. For Android, examples include the Google Play app, the Pocketbook app, and the Bookari app (another MR reader yesterday alerted me to the fact that Pocketbook and Bookari handle this issue well). Then you realize this shouldn't be that hard, and it's kind of mystifying as to why ALL reader apps don't give you a simple toggle "Display using all Publisher CSS settings."

Yes I know, as someone already said, Moon+ includes a "Show Preview with publisher formatting" toggle. And when you enable that, you get a view of the publisher's default layout. But that's only a preview. If you play with this for just a few minutes, you quickly learn that this "view" in Moon+ is crippled. A lot of the functionality that causes you to choose a reader app in the first place is not available, for instance, the only pagination option is scrolling, footnote links don't work, you can't add annotations, etc etc. It's a "preview" mode ONLY.

So yeah, it's kinda mystifying to me why these apps like Moon+ don't enable a fully functional view that uses all the Publisher CSS settings. With really complex layouts, this is about the only way to display the book's content cleanly unless you're prepared to do many hours of minutia hacking the CSS for a specific book just to get it to render correctly. As users, we shouldn't have to do that.

[fduniho]

Hyphenation

By default at least, Librera breaks up and hyphenates long words that come at the end of the line, and Moon+ Reader does not. I am not sure whether they come with options for switching this behavior on or off.

Winner: Moon+ Reader, because I prefer that words do not get broken up, especially when a word comes at the end of a page.

[fduniho]

I have mainly been using Moon+ Reader, but I just tried Librera again, and it appears to have gotten worse. Some text is in Chinese, and I can no longer find any controls for changing the font.

[omneity]

Originally Posted by fduniho

I have mainly been using Moon+ Reader, but I just tried Librera again, and it appears to have gotten worse. Some text is in Chinese, and I can no longer find any controls for changing the font.

I gave up with Librera after an upgrade to the OS on my Likebook Mars meant some menu items in Librera (most notably the page display style) displayed in Chinese. On my Android tablets and phone everything worked OK, so I put it down to the Likebook update.

I've now switched to KoReader which has so many configuration options and works best on eink readers. It's also updated regularly and any bugs/feature requests are easy to report.