[Archived] Marvin ePub reader for iPad

[kguil]

I'm flattered. Thanks Philantrop.

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by Kretzer

But I would not always want a screen break, only when the heading is low down on the screen, rather like some kind of orphan control.

I've been wondering about this same thing, too. Perhaps an expert can answer our question. This "orphan control" definitely exists, for example, in Microsoft Word. Among paragraph properties, you can click the option "Tie with next paragraph", which ensures that that particular paragraph will never occur at the bottom of a (virtual paper) page.

I wonder whether there's an HTML/EPUB equivalent for that Microsoft Word paragraph setting. The trouble is, of course, that HTML is originally a concept for which "pages" are meaningless. Now that we're reading books in EPUB files, which are basically processed HTML files, this raises new questions not known in the days when no handheld reading devices existed.

Originally Posted by Kretzer

Maybe there was some technical issue and you need to try again?

The same thing happened with my Marvin 1.1 review and rating -- they never showed up. Sorry, I'm just too tired trying to get around Apple's stupidity all the time. Especially because of that inexcusable geographical isolation of App Stores -- my review would not be seen by anyone outside my micro-country, anyway.

Originally Posted by Kretzer

there is no reason to keep the ratings and reviews separate (other than maybe language).

Review languages could easily be filtered automatically.

Especially, there is no excuse for isolating app ratings. If a Chinese Marvin user rates Marvin 5 stars, that's just as understandable to me, as when a user from my own micro-country rates Marvin 5 stars. There is no excuse! Why not let me see how all the apps are rated globally? Why deprive Apple customers in my micro-country from that essential help in searching for quality apps?

Because Apple is extremely dumb, that's why. As dumb as can be. Apple is just completely clueless, whenever it comes to the international/multi-lingual aspect of things.

Originally Posted by Kretzer

Did you know you can change the country tag in the links and always get to the same app? Like "at" to "de" here: https://itunes.apple.com/at/app/marvin-ebooks-+-intelligence/id577374971?mt=8 ?

You can't do that in the App Store directly on the iPad or iPhone, which is where users typically search for new apps. So that this particular workaround is useless there.

Originally Posted by Kretzer

Re "trolls" and "jerks": I think people are entitled to freely express their opinion, even if it differs from ours, and even if indeed many reviews are stupid.

Yes, but in no way is that 2-star rating for Marvin serious. Someone was just trolling, and that's it. If it was accompanied by a review explaining the low rating, it might be acceptable, but as it is, it's not.

Originally Posted by Philantrop

Alex, the most likely explanation is that your review somehow violated their guidelines. If you swore ("the fucking greatest app!"), added a link (even a "disguised" one; e. g. marvinapp.com/whatsnew) or something like that, your review will simply be rejected without any notice.

But that's exactly what's unacceptable, Wulf. Even if my review got rejected because of violating their guidelines, there is no excuse (no excuse) for throwing away my 5-star rating also.

If a customer takes the time to submit a review to your darn App Store, and unintentionally violates your guidelines, common decency would command for Apple to notify the customer of the fact. There is no excuse for rejecting the review and failing to notify the review writer.

Besides, when I was submitting my review for Marvin 1.2, after I pushed the "Submit review" link, my original review for Marvin 1.1 popped up. If it's true that that review got rejected for violating review guidelines, why was it still stored there? If it did not get rejected, why has it never appeared in the App Store?

Looking for potential rejection reasons, they could perhaps be that I clearly said Marvin was now better than Stanza, iBooks and Kindle. If that is forbidden to say, sorry -- I don't buy that! It's an essential part of any review, to compare a reviewed product with its direct competitors. Only then can a review become truly useful for the reader of a review.

For what it's worth, here is my review of Marvin 1.2 as I submitted it to my micro-country's App Store many days ago -- and it's still not showing up (nor is the 5-star rating):

Stanza Replacement Finally Here!

I must have needlessly tested or bought about two dozen e-reader apps, searching for the future Stanza replacement after Stanza got stifled by Amazon. iBooks and the Kindle app have been improving at a snail's pace, and the range of customization options offered by them is still woefully minimal compared to Stanza. Now here comes Marvin at long last: Marvin will give you (almost) everything you loved so much about Stanza, and throws in lots of delightful extras, too. It's blazingly fast, too; has a very solid feel to it right fom the first moment you start using it. Fantastic option to export all your notes and bookmarks with a single tap, in an XHTML file -- not even Stanza can do that! The Marvin developer is releasing frequent updates and is actively communicating with the users on the Mobileread forum, listening to and implementing their feedback. (Good luck with reaching most other e-reader developers! I tried, and there was typically no response.) Looking forward to future Marvin improvements, and now I can finally upgrade to iOS 6, after I've held on to iOS 5 mainly for the fear of hurting Stanza. Version 1.2 of Marvin adds an amazing amount of new features and improvements, such as paragraph spacing; ability to export/import/restore/share your bookmarks, highlights and annotations with a single tap of your finger; metadata editor; OPDS catalogs; or 2-column reading in both screen orientations. This app is a triumph in software creation; an iOS landmark and a definite perennial candidate for "Best App Ever", regardless of app category.

[Philantrop]

Alex, cut out the stuff about other readers, especially iBooks. Restrict yourself to commenting on Marvin and then try again. :-)

[Faterson]

No, Wulf. I grew up under the Communist totalitarian regime, and I can recognize censorship when I see it. If Apple intends to employ Joe Stalin's methods in their App Store, that's their right, but then I'm not interested in contributing reviews to their App Store.

As I have just said:

Originally Posted by Faterson

Looking for potential rejection reasons, they could perhaps be that I clearly said Marvin was now better than Stanza, iBooks and Kindle. If that is forbidden to say, sorry -- I don't buy that! It's an essential part of any review, to compare a reviewed product with its direct competitors. Only then can a review become truly useful for the reader of a review.

And again, Wulf: I might perhaps be willing to comply with their guidelines (whatever they are), if Apple at least had the common decency to let me know what is wrong with the review -- if indeed there is anything wrong with it. After all, this could be just another among innumerable Apple bugs. (Remember that travesty that is the current implementation of the new definition dictionaries in iOS 6? Once again: an international/multi-lingual feature, and Apple totally messes it up.)

Because Apple doesn't communicate with their customers and isn't interested in getting feedback from their users, I have no one to turn to at Apple. There is no Apple representative who could look at this issue, is there?

So, let's just forget about this and move on. Apple is extremely dumb, but that is nothing new. Fortunately, Apple's iDevices (which are absolutely awesome, hardware-wise) get rescued all the time by third-party app developers like Kris and his Marvin here, which lets us escape the dire, grey world of inept default iOS apps produced by Apple.

[edbro]

Is there a way to search the entire book without searching chapter by chapter?

[Faterson]

Not currently, but the search feature is due to be improved in Marvin.

[Rhialto]

I tried Marvin and immediately ran into the problem that Marvin imported 1000 books (which?) from my Calibre library inside Dropbox. Since my library is about 2000 books I have no idea which ones are missing and see no easy way to add them. I am not going to manually add them one by one from Dropbox as I discover they are missing from Marvin. So I had to go back to iBooks and iTunes. I hate iTunes, but at least Calibre can synch my library with iTunes and then iTunes can send them all to the ipad.

How do you plan to overcome the limits of the DropBox API? Apologies if I missed the answer in this 53 page thread. I did look through 20 or so pages.

[Faterson]

To me at least, it seems incomprehensible why someone would choose the inferior iBooks reading experience just because Marvin won't directly load all 2000 books from Dropbox for you.

In fact, I've always advocated not storing hundreds of books directly on our e-reader devices, but preferably in the cloud, in those Calibre folders. They are always at hand there, in case you need them. Or is anyone actually reading 2000 books simultaneously?

Take the analogy with movies, for example: would you reasonably expect from the iPad to be able to store all Alfred Hitchcock movies on it permanently, thus wasting the iPad's limited, precious storage space?

Nope, I suppose you wouldn't want to do that... as long as any Hitchcock movie is easily accessible to you at the touch of your finger (be it through Apple's store, or whatever) -- then there's no reason to store all those movies directly and permanently on your handheld device.

But the main point comes down to this: you seem to be willing to sacrifice a superior reading experience for the sake of an automated book-loading or book-storing experience.

But let me ask you: which of the two is really essential here? As to me, I spend about 15 seconds loading an e-book from a Calibre folder stored in SugarSync... and then I spend 10 or 15 hours reading that book.

So, I may spend 0.01% of my time loading or storing a book, and I spend the remaing 99.99% of my time actually reading that book.

What you're saying is, you're willing to exchange 99.99% of superior reading experience for 0.01% of better book-loading or book-storing experience that iBooks (just maybe!) offers.

This doesn't quite make sense to me.

[DaleDe]

Faterson: I've been wondering about this same thing, too. Perhaps an expert can answer our question. This "orphan control" definitely exists, for example, in Microsoft Word. Among paragraph properties, you can click the option "Tie with next paragraph", which ensures that that particular paragraph will never occur at the bottom of a (virtual paper) page.

This is off topic for this thread but yes there are CSS constructions that will prevent this sort of thing. We have groups to talk about this kind of constructions. For example the two sections you want together can be grouped in a <div> and then set CSS to avoid breaking it. It is also possible to create a CSS for the first paragraph after a section and keep it together with the heading. This is certainly not a Marvin issue.

Dale

[ProfCrash]

Please understand that people do things differentlt then you. Some folks like having their entire library on thir devices.

[Rhialto]

Well, firstly, even 1000 books only takes up about 10% or less of my iPad's capacity, and since I don't watch movies on it, I have plenty of space, so thats a non-issue for me.

Of course I have all my books in Calibre on my desktop and dropbox and backed up on a portable hard drive, so security of the books is not an issue either.

What is an issue is being able to browse that library and sort it when you are away from your desktop/Calibre. You have to admit (surely?) that the Dropbox browser is not ideal. The Calibre library has the books in separate folders one for each author. You can't see the covers, sort books according to theme, search the library etc. If the books are in Marvin, or even in iBooks despite its deficiencies, you can organise and browse them to find a book that suits your mood.

Does this help?

Originally Posted by Faterson

To me at least, it seems incomprehensible why someone would choose the inferior iBooks reading experience just because Marvin won't directly load all 2000 books from Dropbox for you.

In fact, I've always advocated not storing hundreds of books directly on our e-reader devices, but preferably in the cloud, in those Calibre folders. They are always at hand there, in case you need them. Or is anyone actually reading 2000 books simultaneously?

[Faterson]

ProfCrash, rest assured I fully respect everyone's private preferences. I'm simply suggesting alternatives, trying to compare the advantages and disadvantages of every option.

Rhialto, because you insist on having all your e-books physically present on your iPad all the time, then the initial loading of the books you already possess now will be a one-off affair for you. No need to switch to iBooks because of a one-time process! So, why not make use of the direct Marvin <-> Calibre connection to load your books into Marvin for the very first time? It will only be necessary for you to use Calibre's content server once. Marvin will allow you to load all of your 2000 books using either the OPDS catalog access to Calibre, or the web access to Calibre.

After you're done, then you should be able to easily and automatically locate any new books subsequently added to your Calibre library, because Marvin's Dropbox feature lets you display all books in your Dropbox account using the "Newest on Top" sorting. I haven't tried this, but this should -- at least in theory -- ensure that whenever you add a new book to Calibre, it will automatically appear at the top of the Dropbox listing within Marvin. Please test this; I'd be interested to learn if that actually works as intended. (I have no way to test this, because I store my Calibre folders in SugarSync, and I'm comfortable with loading books from the SugarSync app whenever I need a particular book.)

PS: Thanks a lot, Dale, for clarifying that orphan paragraph prevention query.

[Faterson]

By the way, this discussion might perhaps inspire Kris to do something I know he wants to avoid: integrating Dropbox into Marvin on a deeper level.

To me personally, this feature has zero importance, and there are likely lots more important features Kris might wish to work on instead, but I can imagine a Marvin user like Rhialto would love such deep Dropbox integration in Marvin.

It's probably a futuristic concept, and likely not made possible by Dropbox as of today, but wouldn't it be great if we could simply browse Dropbox folders from within Marvin, while the books would be displayed in a similarly smart way as they are displaying when we browse, say, an OPDS catalogue in Marvin?

Or think of this: when you browse your folders with photographs in your Dropbox app, you automatically get to see the thumbnails of all photographs. Wouldn't it be great if, while browsing Dropbox folders with e-books in them, we'd automatically get to see the thumbnails of all the book covers? And if clicking on such a thumbnail of a book cover would display that book's metadata and description? Also, it would be great if we could virtually sort books present in our Dropbox folders: for example, we might pick the "Sort by series" sorting option in Marvin, and Marvin would sort all the e-books from Dropbox using that particular criterion -- while the e-books would still remain stored not locally on the iPad, but in the original Dropbox/Calibre folders. I'm afraid this isn't currently possible, because there is, I guess, no way to extract a book's metadata and book cover from Dropbox, without downloading the entire book.

So none of this will likely be possible for Marvin to accomplish without Dropbox meeting Marvin half-way, so to say, by extending the current Dropbox functionality.

If that worked, though, it would be the best of both worlds. For a Marvin user like Rhialto, the difference between having a book stored in the cloud, and having it stored locally, would pretty much disappear. Downloading a typical e-book takes only a few seconds, after all, so there would be no reason to permanently store our e-books in Marvin. For this, though, like Rhialto said, the display of books stored in Dropbox folders would need to be similarly smart as it is now in Marvin's internal Library.

A related (futuristic?) feature wish I might submit: not sure if this is technically possible, but I would welcome if Marvin indicated to us, while we're browsing the Drobpox listing of books, or an OPDS catalog, that we already have a particular e-book stored in Marvin at that moment. There could be a check-mark shown next to a book title, or something similar, telling us we don't need to bother downloading that particular book into Marvin, because it's already there in Marvin's Library.

[artbatista]

Originally Posted by Rhialto

How do you plan to overcome the limits of the DropBox API?

How can anyone possibly overcome the limitations of the dropbox api?

The only way is if dropbox changes the api.

Don't you think it is unfair and unreasonable to ask Kris to fix Dropbox?

Cheers Art

[artbatista]

Originally Posted by Faterson

After you're done, then you should be able to easily and automatically locate any new books subsequently added to your Calibre library, because Marvin's Dropbox feature lets you display all books in your Dropbox account using the "Newest on Top" sorting.

I have tried this Alex, doesn't work. Dropbox loads 1000 books, apparently at random, then sorts those 1000 books by "newest". Those may or may not be the latest 1000 books.

As I said, the Dropbox API is broken in my opinion. I sent correspondence to Dropbox about the 1000 items limitation, got zero, zip, zilch, nada, no response to multiple queries.


Art