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State of Ebook reader apps, 2020
Feb. 22nd, 2020 07:15 amOver a decade into the ebook era, the state of e-reading apps is still dire. Sadly, most people think that a library of 100 books a a whole lot. Even more sadly, just about every e-reader app and device is made by and for such people. So for those of us who regard 100 books as just getting started, the bare minimum they might want to stick on their backup device for a reading emergency, we are SOL.
Long ago, there was the Stanza app, which understood bookworms and which let you view your ebook library as a list of authors, expandable to a list of books by each author. This is really the only way to make a collection of 1000+ ebook novels manageable. Amazon owned the company that made Stanza, and because it was superior in every way to their Kindle software, they killed it -- it seems adopting its features for their kindle app would have been too bruising to the fragile male egos of the programmers responsible for the kindle software.
Various programmers have attempted to step into Stanza's very large shoes. Sadly, few of them have any clue about fulfilling the needs of people with vast ebook libraries. I am aware of only one and a half e-reader apps that implement some kind of author view.
I give half credit to Marvin, which lets you see a scrollable list of authors, but it's just a better implementation of the standard A-Z scrollbar for scrubbing through the main view, which lists every single book individually.
Full credit goes to Shubook, which actually gives you a list of authors with the note "X books" under each author's name if you choose the authors view. Sadly Shubook, despite ten years of development, remains incapable of formatting ebooks correctly. It doesn't do block quoting, different fonts, font size changes, or really any formatting more sophisticated than "here's a new paragraph, here's a page break." It's like trying to read a book in a 1980's DOS word processor - perfectly possible, but not necessarily the best experience, especially for nonfiction with lots of blockquotes, or any book where layout and formatting are important. Morgan put up with the formatting because she refused to use anything without a proper author view. I just gave up on having a ton of books on my device and load a few at a time into marvin or into the built in ibooks app.
Marvin does do formatting (not as well as ibooks). But it has a moronic approach to book metadata. Just like MP3s, ebooks have metadata for the author, title, publisher, etc. And because alphabetization is tricky and software is stupid, they have "author sort" and "title sort" fields to ensure that you see Trinh T. Minh-ha's "The Digital Film Event" under D and not T for titles, and T not M or H for authors.
But on my tablet right now, Marvin thinks that Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow" is called "New Jim Crow, The" by "Alexander, Michelle" -- it uses the "how to sort this" field as the display field, which works, yes, but it looks wrong and stupid.
Not the Shubook is any better - it blithely ignores the sort field, and instead just assumes the last word in the author field is the author's surname, putting Ursula Le Guin under Guin. That's if you change the default book import behaviour to ignore the file name and instead use the metadata -- because by default, Shubook just grabs the string from the book's file name and assumes it's in the format "Title - Author." This does not work well if you use some other naming system, like "Series - Title - Author" or, god forbid, "Author - Series - Title."
And for added WTFery, Marvin does epub and CBR (graphic novel) formats, but not PDF. Shubook does epub and PDF now, but it used to not do PDF (or maybe we tried loading PDFs into it and it handled them incredibly poorly), and it does not handle CBR. And there is not a single app in existence that can display both epub and mobi format books. So, if you read a wide range of stuff, you're going to inevitably need both conversion software and multiple apps -- especially since PDFs do not convert into any other format in a readable manner.
In short, after a decade, there still is not an app for reading ebooks on IOS devices that is not stupidly horrible or cripplingly limited in one way or another. I assume it's just as bad on Android.
Long ago, there was the Stanza app, which understood bookworms and which let you view your ebook library as a list of authors, expandable to a list of books by each author. This is really the only way to make a collection of 1000+ ebook novels manageable. Amazon owned the company that made Stanza, and because it was superior in every way to their Kindle software, they killed it -- it seems adopting its features for their kindle app would have been too bruising to the fragile male egos of the programmers responsible for the kindle software.
Various programmers have attempted to step into Stanza's very large shoes. Sadly, few of them have any clue about fulfilling the needs of people with vast ebook libraries. I am aware of only one and a half e-reader apps that implement some kind of author view.
I give half credit to Marvin, which lets you see a scrollable list of authors, but it's just a better implementation of the standard A-Z scrollbar for scrubbing through the main view, which lists every single book individually.
Full credit goes to Shubook, which actually gives you a list of authors with the note "X books" under each author's name if you choose the authors view. Sadly Shubook, despite ten years of development, remains incapable of formatting ebooks correctly. It doesn't do block quoting, different fonts, font size changes, or really any formatting more sophisticated than "here's a new paragraph, here's a page break." It's like trying to read a book in a 1980's DOS word processor - perfectly possible, but not necessarily the best experience, especially for nonfiction with lots of blockquotes, or any book where layout and formatting are important. Morgan put up with the formatting because she refused to use anything without a proper author view. I just gave up on having a ton of books on my device and load a few at a time into marvin or into the built in ibooks app.
Marvin does do formatting (not as well as ibooks). But it has a moronic approach to book metadata. Just like MP3s, ebooks have metadata for the author, title, publisher, etc. And because alphabetization is tricky and software is stupid, they have "author sort" and "title sort" fields to ensure that you see Trinh T. Minh-ha's "The Digital Film Event" under D and not T for titles, and T not M or H for authors.
But on my tablet right now, Marvin thinks that Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow" is called "New Jim Crow, The" by "Alexander, Michelle" -- it uses the "how to sort this" field as the display field, which works, yes, but it looks wrong and stupid.
Not the Shubook is any better - it blithely ignores the sort field, and instead just assumes the last word in the author field is the author's surname, putting Ursula Le Guin under Guin. That's if you change the default book import behaviour to ignore the file name and instead use the metadata -- because by default, Shubook just grabs the string from the book's file name and assumes it's in the format "Title - Author." This does not work well if you use some other naming system, like "Series - Title - Author" or, god forbid, "Author - Series - Title."
And for added WTFery, Marvin does epub and CBR (graphic novel) formats, but not PDF. Shubook does epub and PDF now, but it used to not do PDF (or maybe we tried loading PDFs into it and it handled them incredibly poorly), and it does not handle CBR. And there is not a single app in existence that can display both epub and mobi format books. So, if you read a wide range of stuff, you're going to inevitably need both conversion software and multiple apps -- especially since PDFs do not convert into any other format in a readable manner.
In short, after a decade, there still is not an app for reading ebooks on IOS devices that is not stupidly horrible or cripplingly limited in one way or another. I assume it's just as bad on Android.
