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Creatve Studios' New Epub3 App is Worse Than Their Old Epub3 App

1388183494_cbc7406327[1]Epub3 is supposed to be a cutting edge ebook format with interactive content, embedded audio and video, and the best text formatting anywhere. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to see any of those features in the Gyan reading app from Helicon Books.

Update: I’ve just learned that the Gyan Reader app (both old and new) was not developed by Helicon Books but was contracted out. Also, that developer is no longer a business partner to Helicon Books, so this review should not be considered a criticism of Helicon Books.

I’ve just spent a fruitless 3 hours trying to install and run Gyan Reader on my Nook HD+ and on my HTC smartphone, with no luck. The app simply doesn’t work.

I made numerous attempts to install, uninstall, reset, and fiddle with this app in both its paid and free versions, to no avail. The paid app cost me $2, and it kept crashing and auto-deleting itself. The free app didn’t crash, but then again it wouldn’t open any ebooks. It was also infested with ads which I am still trying to get off of my smartphone.

Gyan Reader was initially released in April 2013 and is actually this developer’s Helicon Books' second Epub3 reading app. The earlier app was released in late 2012, and it cost me $5 to learn that it didn’t actually support the entire Epub3 spec. But hey, at least it sorta worked.

The older app was never updated, but was instead replaced by the new Gyan Reader, and that meant that anyone who spent money on the app was left in the lurch when the developer broke ties with Helicon Books. I also noted that the app:

… is slow, ugly, uses poorly designed menus, and lacks such basic behavior as responding correctly to the Android “menu” button. It also lacks almost all of the basic features you would expect to find in a paid reading app like bookmarks, notes, and a dictionary.

The newer app I tried today did have a better looking menu, but that is about all I can say about it.

image by zappowbang

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Comments


New Name Same Guy August 22, 2013 um 1:52 am

Think of this as Cricket Draw ’88, the first Mac drawing app that outputted native postscript and yet had a very short life. But now drawing in postscript is de rigueur.


Helen August 22, 2013 um 3:17 am

Strange, I just found Gyan a week ago and it is the only ereader for Android that I have found that works at all. And it does work on my Transformer tablet. I am using the free version, testing fixed layout epub made for iPad, textformatting and many images, and it works. Other than that have just tried the samples included. It´s a bit slow, but I wait for the whole book to load and then it´s OK. I just hope they continue to develop it, haven´t found any other reader for android that works for fixed layout.


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