Rich in features, beautifully designed – Marvin 3 Review

The design is nice, making it easy to find content. The out-of-the-box settings are carefully considered, making for a welcome reading experience. Most of my ebooks render as expected. As someone that reads a lot of non-fiction for both work and education, I’m quickly coming to appreciate a number of useful features that Marvin has. Like most e-readers, it allows bookmarks, highlights, and annotations. Unlike many e-readers, however, it supports multiple colors for bookmarks and highlights, and also makes it easy to paste the highlighted text into the note. There is an upgraded version, and I’ll likely purchase it to support ongoing development. But outside of a relatively non-invasive footer that encouraged you to upgrade, the freeware is polite: there aren’t any distracting or disruptive advertisements. One feature I really wish Marvin had was the ability to automatically synchronize highlights, annotations, and bookmarks across devices. It does allow manual synchronization of location across devices, and it also allows the export and import of annotations, but it doesn’t allow automatic synchronization. This is the only missing feature that has prevented me from purchasing the full version, or giving a full five star rating. Despite that, for a free e-reader, this is significantly better than other options available, such as the popular ePub Reader. It’s also better than Amazon’s Kindle app for non-Kindle content. (For rights-managed Kindle e-books, Amazon’s app is not only necessary, but also does a nice job of synchronizing across devices; it does neither for uploaded content, though.) That said, some worthy competitors worth considering include Google Play Books (which isn’t as feature rich, but works really well) and Hyphen (which promises annotation synchronization).
Review by JeremyCaney on Marvin 3.