Nice Reader – Could Use Some UI Improvement

Marvin is far and away the best looking ePub reader available. It beats iBooks hands down.

I have a great many non-iBooks ePubs that I was keeping organized in iBooks / iTunes, but recent attempts to move them to a new iPad have resulted in nothing but frustration. Since Im living in a post-iTunes world now (Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, etc.), eBooks have become the last bastion, and only reason to continue enduring increasingly sketchy iTunes syncing. It has finally become time to move my library over to Dropbox and read with Marvin.

Other reviews have gone over the positives, so I wont rehash them here. Suffice it to say this is an excellent eReader app. However, I have observed these drawbacks:

• Marvin crashes when importing multiple books from Dropbox, forcing the user to painstakingly tap three times for each book
• Marvin crashes when sending books to the iOS device using AirPlay
• The Dropbox integration doesnt show sub-folders, but instead lumps all books in every sub-folder together, making it hard to find what you want to import
• You have to import every book manually on each device; there should really be Dropbox / iCloud integration to have books automatically appear on all devices when added to one
• Reading position sync is unreliable, except at the beginning of a chapter
• Deep Look data (a less-sophisticated version of Amazons X-Ray) doesnt seem to sync; I spent time combining duplicate characters and otherwise preening this data in one book, only to find it not even enabled on the same book on another device

Overall, Id still recommend this app, especially if sync isnt an issue for you. However, for a $4 app, it seems a little rough around the edges in reliability, UI design, and especially multi-device use.

ChrisVT97 about Marvin Classic - eBook reader for epub