BookFusion

I’ve been on the hunt for the perfect ebook reading app for a while and so far this one is one of the best I’ve found. The UI is beautiful, it’s very customizable, and it’s well organized. My use case is a little specific as I’m using it to read foreign language texts, which means I often need to define/lookup words. It’s SO close to being perfect for me. One thing I would change is that you can’t bring up the inline context menu with the pencil, only with your finger. I wish there was at least an option to not have the pencil automatically highlight, but instead to bring up the menu, as it does with the finger. If the devs were to ever add this option it would easily be my favorite ebook reading app. Edit: I see now that changing the way the pencil works is already possible, from the device settings instead of the app settings. Now that I know this it has greatly improved my experience. The only thing that I would love to see that would make this a perfect app (for me at least) would be the ability to calculate/display page numbers instead of the percentage you are through the book. Sometimes I prefer to structure my reading by “pages” per day so I’m currently having to count manually. I see that this feature has been in the “planned” stage for a while so I hope they implement it soon!

The state of ereading apps has been lackluster for years. Previous apps that were loved and growing were abandoned by the developers, while commercial apps lack support for sideloaded content that books purchased from their respective stores were able to utilize. Enter BookFusion. Not only is it actively supported by a team that is responsive to bugs and issues, they also listen to feedback and implement feature requests that make it one of the best reading apps to date. I’m so impressed with the most recent updates, and love how seamlessly it integrates with Calibre. The syncing between devices is the most reliable I’ve used as well. I’m so glad I found this app!

I take a lot of notes while reading, and when I have gotten a thought down, half the time I delete it because if you accidentally tap *anywhere* outside of the note—such as the dimmed background outside the note modal dialog, including just below the text box where you might be trying to reposition the cursor—then it doesn’t save your note. You must tap the save button and be careful not to touch anything else or bump your phone, otherwise it’s lost. There is already a cancel button and I can even go delete a note if I regret writing it for some reason. The default should always be to save user input immediately and durably. This problem is exacerbated when attempting to take notes on a handheld iPad, and multiplied tenfold if you try to use an Apple Pencil to take notes. Good luck with that. Additionally, I read a lot at night. Every note pops up a non-dark mode keyboard and a bright white modal dialog takes up most of the screen, blinding me and causing me to forget whatever thought I wanted to write down on the highlight I had just made. Seemingly a symptom of lacking any actual dark mode outside the reader theme, as switching to another book at night is also blinding. It’s a shame how difficult and dangerous it is to take notes, since this is one of the few apps with any kind of note export support (you can get a CSV of highlights and notes from the web app). Until these problems are fixed, I’ll be stuck with Google Play Books 😓