Marvin is a fast, intelligent eBook reader for your iPad. What sets Marvin apart is its clean interface, extensive customization options, faithful layouts, ergonomics and an incredible Artificial Intelligence engine that reads your books with you. Marvin helps you discover amazing things about your books, their characters, places and anything else. You can also pin any review, article or website to your books and create summaries of them.
Books don't need to be formatted or prepared in any special way. We've designed Marvin to work great with just about any book you already have.
Of course, Marvin is also a great eBook reader that has all the features you'd expect from a modern reading app as well as others you won't find anywhere else.
Whilst there are many eBook readers out there, none of them let us explore our favorite stories beyond the book itself. We believe that the next step in the evolution of eBook readers is intelligence - they should understand our books and make them special.
Most makers of the "big" reading apps are focused on their book-selling business and are slow in adding features that actually improve the reading experience itself. For instance, it took years before some readers let you change fonts, pick a night theme or read in full screen mode. Some of them still don't have features that most people would take for granted, such as sizing margins.
If you're into DRM-free books, we've worked hard to make Marvin a much better way to read and enjoy them.
We've also got some amazing new features in the pipeline. We're up late at night working on making Marvin better, faster and smarter.
The first time you tap "Deep View" in a book, Marvin offers to read it for you. Marvin uses very cool Artificial Intelligence and natural language algorithms to analyze your book and finds all the characters, places and other names in it. After Marvin has finished reading your book you can:
- Look up characters and other names in the book in Wikipedia or anywhere on the Internet straight from within the app.
- Annotate names in the book and share your research.
- Find out where a name appeared first in the book. This is great if you forgot who a character is and need to quickly look it up.
- Fetch articles about the book and author biographies.
- Learn more about the book. Was it made into a movie, a play, a radio drama?
- Find and attach links to web content such as reviews and videos.
- Build summaries of the book.
Marvin lets you open and read books in many languages. Right now, Deep View works with books written in English. More languages will be added in the future.
Marvin is very efficient and can analyze many regular-sized books in well under a minute.
Very long novels or biographies will take longer. A test 350-chapter book containing over 6500 characters, places and other names takes about four-and-a-half minutes on an iPad 2 (of course, this is an exceptional case we use for testing).
Analysis only needs to be done once.
Marvin opens DRM-free books in the ePub 2.0 format.
Your best bet is to check our roadmap for the latest and greatest features.
- A clean, modern user interface.
- Warmth and tint controls in addition to brightness.
- A reading list, custom and smart collections.
- Correcting incomplete or missing table of contents.
- Intelligent resizing of tiny hyperlinks to help you tap them easier.
- Footnote and hyperlink highlighting pinpoints link targets for easy identification when cross-referencing.
- Full export of notes, highlights, name lists, article lists and summaries to formats compatible with most web browsers and word processors.
- Library shuffling – useful when you’re looking for something new to read.
- Font size, margin size, line spacing, indentation, hyphenation and justification controls.
- Three fully customizable themes.
- Smart-snapping gestures (multiple page turns or snap to bookmarks and chapters).
- Multi-colored bookmarks (great for reference or proof-reading work).
- Find eBooks anywhere in your Dropbox. The most recent books you put in your Dropbox appear on top (of course, you can also sort alphabetically).
- Author jump lists to find books by an author quickly.
- Friend lists for sharing stuff quickly.
- A reading timer to make sure you read ‘just enough’.
- Vertical swipes to change brightness and warmth.
- Handpicked, beautiful reading fonts.
- Includes OpenDyslexic, a bottom-heavy, specialty font to assist users with dyslexia. Marvin is listed on dyslexiaHelp.umich.edu.
- Contextual page scrubbing.
- Full-book search. You can also email search results for reference.
- One or two column page layouts.
- Metadata editing.
- Word counts in libraries.
- OPDS catalogs with HTTP and HTTPS authentication.
- A dedicated Web Browser to download books from.
No. Marvin is well behaved.
To access books in your Dropbox, Marvin doesn't need to (or can) access your Dropbox password. Authentication with Dropbox happens over Dropbox's infrastructure.
The "Follow Marvin on Twitter" option uses iPad's built-in Twitter account setup to follow only. Marvin cannot access your Twitter password, doesn't read your friends list or post anything on your behalf.
Marvin doesn't access your contacts, emails, text messages or GPS. When accessing certain websites (e.g. a maps site) you might be prompted to let Marvin access your location. It is the website that is requesting this information and not Marvin. You can safely dismiss and ignore this message.
No.
Marvin collects metrics about app usage and problems but nothing that is used to identify you. This information helps us improve Marvin a lot. If you are uncomfortable with this, you can turn metrics off from the settings page. Information that Marvin collects includes:
- Details about app crashes (so that we can fix them).
- Features you are using frequently so that we can focus improvements on them.
- Settings you are using (such as your preferred fonts).
- Any mistakes made by the A.I. engine.
- Details about your library and how many books you have in it (so that we can improve compatibility and loading performance).
- A random number that is used to identify sessions. This number is reset every time you install Marvin and cannot be used to track you (especially since your personal information is never sent).
We don't like apps that steal our information, so we didn't write one ourselves.
Marvin is incredibly flexible in this regard:
- Getting a book into Marvin is easiest if you have a Dropbox account. Just put your books anywhere in your Dropbox folder and Marvin will find them.
- If your books are stored in an OPDS catalog (e.g. in Calibre), you can use Marvin's OPDS browser to browse and search them. You can also access public catalogs to find new books.
- Marvin has a built-in web browser designed to download books from. You can access books on your Calibre server as well as any other website.
- You can email books to yourself and open them in Marvin on your iPad.
- Finally, you can drag books into the Marvin app using iTunes on your Mac or PC. There is a nice tutorial on how to do this here.
Marvin opens any DRM-free eBook in the ePub 2.0 format. There are lots of places where you can get free eBooks such as Feedbooks, Manybooks, Project Gutenberg and the Internet archive.
Contemporary authors and publishers are now starting to distribute their books in ePub without DRM.
The short answer is yes. However, stripping DRM might be illegal in your country. Remember that authors put a lot of effort in writing a good book. Do the right thing.
Marvin will not strip DRM from your books.
Marvin lets you share name lists, article lists, highlights, notes and summaries using email. You can also set up a friends list so that you can share things with them quickly without having to type in their email addresses all the time. Name lists, article lists, highlights and notes are sent in a format called XHTML that can be opened in any web browser and edited in virtually all word processors.
In the latest version, we added a cool feature where you can export a special annotations file with all your bookmarks, highlights and notes that you can import later. You can also send this file to your friends to share annotations with them.
Unless the book is in the public domain or the author/publisher has expressly given the public permission to do so, don't use this feature to distribute copyrighted material.
Not yet. Marvin opens ePub 2.0 files. We're looking into supporting ePub 3.0.
During a normal start up, Marvin quickly scans your iPad for new books. On a first generation iPad with a library of hundreds of books, this usually takes less than 10 seconds. On newer iPads or smaller libraries this process is much faster. This is comparable to (and in some cases much better than) most eBook readers out there.
When you add new books via iTunes drag-and-drop, Marvin will import them in your library when it starts up. This import can take a couple of seconds for every new book you add, so the startup time depends on how many new books you put. After your new books have been added to your library, Marvin starts up normally again.
If any corrupted eBooks are detected when starting up, and cannot be imported, Marvin will offer to delete them from your iPad. Generally, you should let Marvin delete them since they're useless anyway. If you don't, Marvin will try to import them again (and waste time) the next time it loads.
Marvin opens ePub books so the files must end with the ".epub" file extension. If the books are DRM protected, Marvin cannot open them.
During testing, we use a wide selection of eBooks from many different sources. Unfortunately, some files claiming to be ePub books are not or are badly made. In some cases, Marvin can successfully repair them but in others it is impossible. Try and download the book again. You can also get Calibre (a great eBook manager) and see if your books can be imported there. If you're sure that your eBooks are good and there's something wrong with Marvin, send us an email at support@marvinapp.com and we'll do our best to help you out.
Send us an email at support@marvinapp.com.
