Main Features
Version 3.9.7
ShuBook — Millions of FREE Books at Your Fingertips
Below is a list of the features of ShuBook / ShuBook SE. Items marked with * and ad removal are only available in ShuBook with Package A purchased.
ShuBook SE is functionally equivalent to ShuBook with Package A activated, but without the trouble of going through the in-app purchase process.
1. Book Import and Export
Inside ShuBook a book can be downloaded to the library from a link on a web page, from an entry in an OPDS catalog, from an email attachment, from a cloud server, or from iTunes.
Outside ShuBook a book can be transferred to the library via the “Open In” feature of many popular apps such as Safari and Mail and Dropbox.
- Preset Book Sources: ShuBook provides a list of preset book sites as convenient entry points for users. The current list contains a number of book sites with a total of over 3 million free ebook titles.
- Custom Book Sources: Users may also download books from tapping on their own custom book sources with custom icons:
- iTunes File Sharing*: import with one-tap
- Catalogs (auto)*: auto-discover any calibre OPDS catalog via Bonjour, and download multiple books with one tap.
- Catalogs (manual): enter any catalog address on LAN or Internet.
- Web pages: enter any web page address on LAN or Internet, including Dropbox
- Email attachment
- Aggressive Download: for files with URLs that are not otherwise considered downloadable
- Background Download*: While a book download is in progress, you may read another book, or browse the catalogs.
- Book Export*: export all books to iTunes; export one book at a time via email, iTunes, or “Open In...” other compatible applications, such as iBooks.
2. Library Management
ShuBook is designed for a library holding thousands of books. You may- Sort the books by their titles, authors, labels, or by user re-ordering
- Group the books by authors or labels hierarchically
- Browse the library with the index bar
- Search a book by its title or author
- Preview the description of a book without opening it by simply tapping on its book cover icon
- Edit* the title, author and label of any book in the full or search result list. Labels may be used to satisfy multiple ways of categorization.
- Restore Publisher Defaults (title, author, cover image) of ePub books
- Scan the reading progress of each (ePub/txt/PDB) book as a percentage or a pie chart
- Use advanced cache management to minimize total storage footprint
- Reading progress sync across devices
3. Book Reading
The default viewer for all supported formats is like a web browser. However, for EPUB, TXT, PDB/uPDB, the viewer looks and feels more like a book. You may- Navigate in multiple ways: tap or swipe to flip page, jump to any page within the chapter, jump to any chapter via the table of contents menu
- Change layout settings: change book language code, hyphenation, font name, font size, text alignment, paragraph indentation, paragraph spacing, line spacing, and even letter spacing for all books or on a per-book basis
- Change look & control: change settings for lock page orientation, night mode, black status bar, color (background, text, heading), show page number, brightness control, disable sleep, page turn effect, page turn duration, tap & hold duration, tap always forward (to next page on left or right edge)
- Manage multiple bookmarks per book
- Perform full text search and keep search history
- Look up built-in English-English dictionary (iOS 5 only)
- Read in comic/figure mode*: touch & hold on an image to enter this mode
- Manage user fonts*: import via iTunes any compatible TTF font for book reading
4. Language-specific Support
ShuBook has two prominent features specially designed for books written in East Asian languages, and Chinese in particular. They are applicable to EPUB, TXT, PDB/uPDB books.- Vertical layout styles*: applicable to books with a language code indicating Chinese, Japanese or Korean with an expected mix of Han characters, hiragana, katakana, and/or hangul.
- Hanzi conversion*: on-the-fly and accurate “one-touch conversion” between Simplified Chinese (SC) and Traditional Chinese (TC) text.
† PDB/uPDB is for haodoo.net version only.