Life In 19x19

The good news: SmartGo books are now available in epub format for those of us who haven't yet seen the iLight!

The slightly annoying news: there are a ton of different epub readers out there for Android, and so far I haven't found one that's quite right for go books. I'm looking for recommendations.

Mostly I'm using Gitden, one of only two I've found so far that can actually display the go diagrams at all. It seems to do fine with the interactivity. But it's a bit annoying for reading text: sometimes it needs to think for a few seconds before displaying the next page, and there's no "go back" option when you follow a hyperlink.

For text-heavy passages (e.g. the first chunk of Gateway to All Marvels, which is fascinating and doesn't use diagrams), I've been using AIReader. It's a nice interface for text, but won't show me a go board at all (I just get a mess of special characters). I've also tried Moon Reader, EBookDroid, and FBReader with similar results: no diagrams in any of these.

PocketBook will show diagrams and is also OK for navigation, but there's no interactivity: you can't step through the moves in the diagram.

There's a lot of other apps to choose from, but it's hard to tell from descriptions whether or not they're going to work, and I don't want to start downloading them all. Does anyone have a success story here?

I use Lithium. It shows the diagrams and is good for reading texts, but has a flaw when l interactive diagrams, because it toggles header and footer lines in and out each time you press a button. If you don't use interactive diagrams, is a good choice.

Thanks for the suggestion. I just downloaded it. The layout is nice, and the (static) diagrams look fine. Do you know if there's a way to follow a hyperlink then go back to the previous page? This is the one reason why I don't find Gitden satisfactory!

Two more suggestions for Android ePub readers:
- Reasily https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... pp.reasily
- Adobe Digital Editions https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... aleditions

Please let me know what your experiences are with those apps.

On five minutes' acquaintance, Reasily is looking like the best yet. Thanks for the suggestion! It doesn't have the odd pauses that Gitden reader had, and seems to be just fine with the interactive diagrams.

Adobe Digital Editions gets awful reviews/ratings on Google Play (1.9 out of 5 stars), so I'm not planning to install it.

By the way, I solved my hyperlink problem. On both lithium and reasily, my tablet's "back" button takes me back to the previous page! I hadn't thought to try it because many apps (including Gitden) interpret "back" as a "quit" button, and will either take you to a home screen (in the case of Gitden) or quit the app altogether.

Here's another option for people who like tinkering. Turns out that the epub file format is mostly just zipped HTML. So you can make a copy of your epub file, change the .epub part of the name to .zip, unzip it, and open contents.xhtml in Firefox. (A little bit fiddly because of Android security features: it took a couple of goes to find a file manager that didn't lie to Firefox about the file location. ES File Explorer worked for me.) Then all the hyperlinks and interactive diagrams will work just fine.

Not ideal for problem books because you lose the page breaks, so you can end up with problem and solution diagram on the same page. But works well for text and game records.

Actually I think Reasily is the best of the options I've tried so far. I'm just including this one for completeness.