Buggy and seemingly designed by bug-loving linux geeks
i2Reader seemed like a promising replacement for the now-defunct Stanza, as its the only reader app that offers many of Stanzas key features, like grouping books and fine control over how books are displayed. Be warned, though: this app is a DISASTER.
First, its buggy as heck. Yes, you can (tediously) put books in groups (i.e. folders) to make managing your library easier… but shortly after you do, all your groups will vanish, taking all the books inside with them. Theyre still there, theyre just hidden. You have to use the search tool to find them and then edit each books metadata to remove the group assignment in order to make them visible again. Or you can wait for one of the brief, random intervals when your groups just magically reappear for a little while — before quickly disappearing again. There were plenty of other bugs, too. Calibre support is basically useless. The drag handle for setting the top margin got stuck in place through several force-quits and restarts of the app. And it crashed all the time in all sorts of different situations even after I force-quit just about everything else I was running just to free up memory.
And second, and perhaps even more importantly, the screenshots and feature list utterly fail to convey how stunningly ganky the interface is. The best example is the way you set book display options, like font, font size and color, margins, text flow, and so on. You dont just quickly access some convenient and easy-to-use controls like you could in Stanza and then see exactly how your changes are affecting the book youre reading. Oh no. You have to leave the book youre reading, navigate over to preferences, and then pick a style sheet, which is sort of like a little book template. The app includes a bunch of different ones, all of which are ghastly from a design and reading perspective, and you modify your display settings by changing things in the template… except you cant alter any of the built-in ones, you have to copy one of them and then work from there, meaning that every time you go to style preferences (which will be many, many, many times, for reasons Ill get to in a moment) you also have to scroll to the bottom of a long list to get past all the crappy built-in styles to get to your user-created ones. And then, once youre editing/reading one of your own style templates, you have to do things like tap and hold on a block of text in order to open a font panel to change the font assignment for any ebook text thats tagged with the same tag that particular block in the template is tagged with.
Ganky enough by itself, but there are two further problems with this idiotic system. First, the resulting size of the text in the style template IS NOT THE SAME as the size you see in actual books youre reading in the app! In my experience, the text in the template was always larger, so I kept having to go back to the book, see the text was still too small, leave the book, go to prefs, go to styles, scroll all the way down, open my template, find the appropriate block of text, tap and hold, and then edit the font size AGAIN — and lather, rinse and repeat many more times, since the template basically never looked like the book. i2Reader is doing some kind of bizarre scaling that only applies inside the style templates, so fonts generally looked like large crap in the template and then looked smaller than I wanted but better-rendered in the actual book. But it gets worse, because… Second, there are apparently a many different tags used in every ebook and a huge variety in the tags used by different ebooks, and just about none of the template text is labeled with its corresponding tag but all of it has to be altered individually, meaning that i2Readers template system DOESN"T ALLOW YOU TO SIMPLY SET A GLOBAL FONT FOR DISPLAYING A BOOK OR BOOKS! Oh no! You have to laboriously alter the font (and size, and color, and so on) of every different part of the template, dealing with the horribly broken scaling feature every step of the way — and in most cases, you have to guess which part of the template corresponds to which part of a book and then go back to see what actually happened. And because of the variance in tagging between ebooks, a style that looks OK in one book will be completely unusable in another.
There are many other problems with the app, but I hope that gives you enough info to avoid it like the plague. Unfortunately, I havent found anything to match Stanzas beautiful ease of use, extensive but user-friendly and well-designed feature set, and beautiful rendering of books, but i2Reader isnt even remotely acceptable as a substitute.
Paul_I about
i2Reader, v4.1.1