BookFusion eBook Reader & Management Sync Across All Devices Android, iOS & Web

[skillachie]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

When I am testing the app to see what think of it, I don't require syncing. I do have an iPad as well as an iPhone and if I decided to use the app on both and I wanted syncing, then I can register for an account. But just to test on my iPhone, syncing is not required. If I decided to enable syncing, then I'd register for an account. But there are a lot of people who may not want to register just to be able to use it for the first time.

Thanks a lot for the insight JSWolf. I will reach out to you via PM when we have updated our app to not require signup initially.

[skillachie]

Originally Posted by canpolat

@skillachie

I remember trying BookFusion a long time ago, and I thought it was not fit for my needs. But now, it looks pretty solid, and I am considering converting to it from my current workflow. I have some questions and could not find related information anywhere on the site. I hope you have some answers for me:

1. I uploaded 8 PDF books to try it out. The "processing" time seems very long. It did not really bother me that much in the beginning, but when I do a simple change on a book it takes the same amount of "processing" to get that edit in place. What is this "processing" and why does it take so much time? (The 'simple change' here being removing the 'Public?' flag from a book and it has been processing for the last 20 minutes or so).
2. After the processing, BookFusion correctly read the XMP data from my books, but fields like Publisher, Language and Subject are not fetched. Only the Title and Author fields were presented. Does BookFusion attempt to read XMP data? If so, would it be possible to at least parse the 'Subject' field and use it to populate Tags? I think that is almost a one-to-one match.
3. As a personal user I don't see any limits as to how many books I can store in total. Is it unlimited? If it is unlimited does BookFusion promise to keep it that way in the future? If not, is there a plan on introducing paid plans?
4. Can I share my books with other people who also have BookFusion accounts? If so, how (do I need an organization/enterprise account for that)?
5. Is there a way to view the books as a list instead of grid?

These are my initial questions. It may sound 'too many' but it's only because I am genuinely interested and need to understand it before the move.

Thank you in advance.

>1. I uploaded 8 PDF books to try it out. The "processing" time seems very long. It did not really bother me that much in the beginning,

Looking at the only PDFs that have remained in the "processing" state. The 8 PDFs that you uploaded to test comes back as being encrypted during the conversion process.

Will PM you to get permission to evaluate the document. We plan to support encrypted PDFs in the future

Conversions are pretty fast otherwise.

>2. After the processing, BookFusion correctly read the XMP data from my books, but fields like >Publisher, Language and Subject are not fetched. Only the Title and Author fields were presented. >Does BookFusion attempt to read XMP data? If so, would it be possible to at least parse the 'Subject' field and use it to populate Tags? I think that is almost a one-to-one match.


We extract all metadata from the books when uploaded. However we only display Title and Author to our readers. Parsing the subject field to populate tags is a great suggestion. Thanks

>3. As a personal user I don't see any limits as to how many books I can store in total. Is it unlimited? >If it is unlimited does BookFusion promise to keep it that way in the future? If not, is there a plan on >introducing paid plans?

Currently all our early users can upload and read a unlimited number of books as we continue to build and refine our platform. We will not restrict or place limits on the accounts now or in the future for our active early users

However we will provide the option to pay $30 -$35 per year to new readers for an unlimited account. Early active readers will see a different option for $15 per year that you can pay to show your support. The plan will provide the unlimited account, book discounts and prizes(for example tablet giveaway). You would be able


>4. Can I share my books with other people who also have BookFusion accounts? If so, how (do I need an >organization/enterprise account for that)?

We have temporarily disabled this functionality until we have integrated notifications and messaging in our app. This will be enabled this year with an updated flow along with the release of the friends & family options that would make sharing your ebooks more intuitive

>>5. Is there a way to view the books as a list instead of grid?

Not yet but planned for this year.


These are not many at all and we are happy to know that you are genuinely interested. See some initial screenshots for the list view and the friends and family options that will allow you to easily share your ebooks once they have an account.


We have a lot of upcoming changes and features that we believe will truly create a better reading experience for our readers.

[canpolat]

Originally Posted by skillachie

>1. I uploaded 8 PDF books to try it out. The "processing" time seems very long. It did not really bother me that much in the beginning,

Looking at the only PDFs that have remained in the "processing" state. The 8 PDFs that you uploaded to test comes back as being encrypted during the conversion process.

Will PM you to get permission to evaluate the document. We plan to support encrypted PDFs in the future

Conversions are pretty fast otherwise.

>2. After the processing, BookFusion correctly read the XMP data from my books, but fields like >Publisher, Language and Subject are not fetched. Only the Title and Author fields were presented. >Does BookFusion attempt to read XMP data? If so, would it be possible to at least parse the 'Subject' field and use it to populate Tags? I think that is almost a one-to-one match.


We extract all metadata from the books when uploaded. However we only display Title and Author to our readers. Parsing the subject field to populate tags is a great suggestion. Thanks

>3. As a personal user I don't see any limits as to how many books I can store in total. Is it unlimited? >If it is unlimited does BookFusion promise to keep it that way in the future? If not, is there a plan on >introducing paid plans?

Currently all our early users can upload and read a unlimited number of books as we continue to build and refine our platform. We will not restrict or place limits on the accounts now or in the future for our active early users

However we will provide the option to pay $30 -$35 per year to new readers for an unlimited account. Early active readers will see a different option for $15 per year that you can pay to show your support. The plan will provide the unlimited account, book discounts and prizes(for example tablet giveaway). You would be able


>4. Can I share my books with other people who also have BookFusion accounts? If so, how (do I need an >organization/enterprise account for that)?

We have temporarily disabled this functionality until we have integrated notifications and messaging in our app. This will be enabled this year with an updated flow along with the release of the friends & family options that would make sharing your ebooks more intuitive

>>5. Is there a way to view the books as a list instead of grid?

Not yet but planned for this year.


These are not many at all and we are happy to know that you are genuinely interested. See some initial screenshots for the list view and the friends and family options that will allow you to easily share your ebooks once they have an account.


We have a lot of upcoming changes and features that we believe will truly create a better reading experience for our readers.

Thank you for your response.

>Currently all our early users can upload and read a unlimited number of books as we continue to build and refine our platform. We will not restrict or place limits on the accounts now or in the future for our active early users

>However we will provide the option to pay $30 -$35 per year to new readers for an unlimited account. Early active readers will see a different option for $15 per year that you can pay to show your support. The plan will provide the unlimited account, book discounts and prizes(for example tablet giveaway). You would be able

Good to know this in advance. I think $30 -$35 per year is quite reasonable.

I will be looking forward to get the sharing option so that I can invite my friends over.

This looks promising

[skillachie]

Thanks cagpolat. We are happy to know that you are excited as we are.

PS: You have PM.

[Lizj1]

Hi Skillachie

I had a look at BookFusion and I think it could be a great product to take my library with me wherever I go, but for me, it is missing a couple of features.

I uploaded a couple of books. I would LOVE to be able to click on the cover and see all the metadata (like I can with Calibre). At the moment it just offers to download the book.

Maybe more importantly, I wish BookFusion would properly support book series, with a series name and a number within the series, so that when I finish 1 book, I can easily see what's next.

Do you plan to add any features like that?

At the moment, I think I have to dive in to setting up my own domain and using Calibre Companion to get a sufficiently detailed view of my library

Thanks,
Liz

[skillachie]

Originally Posted by Lizj1

Hi Skillachie

I had a look at BookFusion and I think it could be a great product to take my library with me wherever I go, but for me, it is missing a couple of features.

I uploaded a couple of books. I would LOVE to be able to click on the cover and see all the metadata (like I can with Calibre). At the moment it just offers to download the book.

Maybe more importantly, I wish BookFusion would properly support book series, with a series name and a number within the series, so that when I finish 1 book, I can easily see what's next.

Do you plan to add any features like that?

At the moment, I think I have to dive in to setting up my own domain and using Calibre Companion to get a sufficiently detailed view of my library

Thanks,
Liz

Hi Liz,

Thank you for taking us for a spin.

1)Support for series - planned
2)Display metadata on or below book cover - did not have this planned but can make updates to neatly display key pieces of meta data on the book cover. Added

Best,
Dwayne

[Lizj1]

Sounds good Dwayne, I will definitely keep playing with this.

On the subject of displaying metadata, have you considered the use case of a user with many books and a poor memory "shopping" their library for something to read? Rather than, say, searching for a specific book, I imagine scrolling through my library with maybe a pop-up window with the full metadata, including the publisher's blurb (if I have loaded it in the description) making finding a book enjoyable.

Looking at your bookstore, I feel that the data there is very sparse, probably not enough for an unfamiliar book to grab me. I see that I could read a sample, but I need to be somewhat engaged before I will do that. Have you considered making the descriptions richer?

It certainly looks promising!

Liz

[skillachie]

Originally Posted by Lizj1

Sounds good Dwayne, I will definitely keep playing with this.

On the subject of displaying metadata, have you considered the use case of a user with many books and a poor memory "shopping" their library for something to read? Rather than, say, searching for a specific book, I imagine scrolling through my library with maybe a pop-up window with the full metadata, including the publisher's blurb (if I have loaded it in the description) making finding a book enjoyable.

Looking at your bookstore, I feel that the data there is very sparse, probably not enough for an unfamiliar book to grab me. I see that I could read a sample, but I need to be somewhat engaged before I will do that. Have you considered making the descriptions richer?

It certainly looks promising!

Liz

Hi Liz,

Finding books in a large collection/library - Even though we do not display all meta information immediately to the user. Your able to browse books by author, tags and categories. When the reader searches their library all related meta data gets searched. However, we do have plans to redo the interface to make filtering and organizing via metadata easier. I will be sure to reach out to you for feedback once the mocks are ready.

Books on Store - For the books that have been uploaded by publishers or self-published authors they specify the book description and determine when to enable sampling. However we do plan to enhance this by displaying related highlights and comments from other readers that have already read the book.


Best.
Dwayne

[Pizza_Cant_Read]

Hey there! I was wondering if you planned any compatibility with calibre or if would be possible to import an entire collection from an existing calibre collection? It would be great to be able to import books in an easier manner and keep calibre metadata.

Also I understand maybe it isn't working yet but I look forward to being able to share books later. Another thing, what do you plan to do with the public libraries on your platform? I am very excited to see what you are up to! Thank you for providing this free for now service!

Most importantly, from what country are you based and what do you guys do with our books other than providing this service? What do you do with our reading records?

Thanks in advance,

PCR

[skillachie]

Originally Posted by Pizza_Cant_Read

Hey there! I was wondering if you planned any compatibility with calibre or if would be possible to import an entire collection from an existing calibre collection? It would be great to be able to import books in an easier manner and keep calibre metadata.

Also I understand maybe it isn't working yet but I look forward to being able to share books later. Another thing, what do you plan to do with the public libraries on your platform? I am very excited to see what you are up to! Thank you for providing this free for now service!

Most importantly, from what country are you based and what do you guys do with our books other than providing this service? What do you do with our reading records?

Thanks in advance,

PCR

Hey Pizza_Cant_Read,

Thank you for your interest.

1. Calibre Plugin - Yes we have this on our roadmap currently and will have it released shortly after we have deployed sharing with friends and a few other updates for our iOS and Android apps

2. Share eBooks - Yes this will be released in Q1 - Q2 next year

3. Public Libraries - We have our business/organization business/organization offering which we offer that can be private or public libraries which is paid for by the organization. If you are referring to personal user accounts then we plan to do nothing other than building a service that meets their eBook needs.

4. Our use of your books and reading records - To make it sort we do not sell or distribute any data about or created by our readers. We have a paid premium plan for readers that have a large collection. Based in NY and all servers are also in the US.

We only store your eBooks as expected to allow you to sync and download them between devices. We store reading records and associated activities like bookmarks and comments again just to have them synced and accessible across all your devices. We also allow you to export your highlights.

We have a premium offering for users with large collections that you can currently upgrade to for unlimited storage/uploads to organize, read, share and sync your eBooks across all devices. This option will start to be displayed when a reader uploads 20 or more books. Please feel free to sign up and take us for a spin and if you are interested in our service signal your support by upgrading to our premium reader account. This will help to drive features that you are interested in.

We also have a Send To Kindle option that allows you to easily send your books to your Kindle device as well

PS: Our premium offering is currently at 50% off and will remain that way for early subscribers.

[284984]

Not ready to jump ship fully yet but it's extremely promising. I'll be keeping a close eye on BookFusion. I think this is a massive, massive gap in the market and I hope you nail it, been looking for this product/service for years.

[skillachie]

Originally Posted by 284984

Not ready to jump ship fully yet but it's extremely promising. I'll be keeping a close eye on BookFusion. I think this is a massive, massive gap in the market and I hope you nail it, been looking for this product/service for years.

Thanks a lot for trying our platform.

We released an updated IOS version yesterday that has improvements in for both PDF and EPUB. Will do a separate post with the details. What are the critical items that you would like to see implemented or improved to have you jump ship fully to using BookFusion?

[Sarmat89]

- No metadata for local files
- No FB2 support
- No OPDS support
- No font/margin settings
- No page turning by click
- Piss-poor performance, even on files <1 MB.

That's a joke, not a reading app.

[skillachie]

@Sarmat89 someone was having a bad day it seems. Thanks a lot for the feedback

>- No metadata for local files
Metadata is automatically extracted remotely and synced to the device. However we will start extracting certain elements locally which is planned

>- No FB2 support
This format is supported if you upload your files via the web app initially. By default we support EPUB and PDF in our native apps

>- No font/margin settings
You will be able to select your font style in the next release which was already planned

>- No page turning by click
Not accurate as you can turn all pages by tapping or swiping

>- Piss-poor performance, even on files <1 MB.
Also not accurate as we have tested our apps on low end devices for emerging markets.

It seems you might have had device specific issues that resulted in some of the experience you had before. Please feel free to ping us your email that you used to signup at support@bookfusion.com and your device to allow us to investigate if interested.

[JSWolf]

How well does BookFusion follow CSS while allowing some overrides?