Grey Warden

F. C. Yee’s The Rise of Kyoshi delves into the story of Kyoshi, the Earth Kingdom–born Avatar. The longest-living Avatar in this beloved world’s history, Kyoshi established the brave and respected Kyoshi Warriors, but also founded the secretive Dai Li, which led to the corruption, decline, and fall of her own nation. The first of two novels based on Kyoshi, The Rise of Kyoshi maps her journey from a girl of humble origins to the merciless pursuer of justice who is still feared and admired centuries after she became the Avatar. 

A princess who has lost her mother and father finds herself in a terrifying world that urgently needs a queen.

Sophia is smart, beautiful, and accomplished, a beloved princess devoted to the people and to reading books. The kingdom is hers, until she is plunged into a nightmarish realm populated by the awful beasts she read about as a child.

The beasts are real. And so is the great army marching on her castle. The people look to Sophia for protection. They will all perish unless she can unlock an ancient secret as profound as life and death itself.

Next up on the queue...

eReader Prestigio: Book Reader is a multi lingual, multi format text and audio books reading app. Intuitive interface in over 25 languages and an in app store library with over 50,000 text (for children and adults) books and Text-To-Speech (read along) functionality.

☆ Prestigio ebooks reader is cool – book and text reading never been simpler – you can read text files in multiple formats including epub, html, fb2, fb2.zip, txt, pdf, mobi, epub3, djvu and multiple other text and audio book formats.

☆ Tired of reading? Switch on Text-To-Speech and let the application read the text book file for you! Kids books read along – let us read the best bed time stories for you.

☆ Personalize your reading:

✔ Material Design and simple navigation – its cool

✔ Multiple Shelf Themes and in book backgrounds (add your own)

✔ Scan library for specific file and text book formats ✔ Inbuilt dictionary with Color Dict

✔ Text-To-Speech for reading books aloud in multiple languages

✔ In-App Store best books in epub & fb2 formats

✔ Home screen, Recent books, In book Menu, Android Home Widget ✔ Multiple fonts, sizes and styles for best and cool reading

✔ Night mode

✔ Books Collection – create, edit and store your books, organized by desired criteria (genre, author, added time or series) and view them in covers or list views

✔ File Manager – easily find your ebook or text file and set of enjoying reading your stories

✔ Synchronize your books and text files from cloud services such as Google Drive, One Drive & Dropbox directly into books collections

☆ Create ebooks My Prestigio account to

✔ Synchronize books between devices library (only synchronize text files where you left off, not full library)

✔ Download free books (adult and children) and texts from In-App ereader book store

✔ Buy new books from in-app ereader book store

✔ Keep downloaded books in the Prestigio Cloud

✔ Create wish lists

✔ Book Purchase Vouchers

☆ Smart ebooks search function on your device ✔ Scan your library to quickly find text files and books

☆ Multiple book formats support ereader supports the following ebooks formats:

✔ Text files: epub, djvu, html, fb2, fb2.zip, txt, pdf, mobi, epub3

✔ Audio books stories & video files in books ☆ Multi lingual User Interface Support 25 Interface languages supported and growing: English, Russian, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Greek, Finnish, Czech, Polish, Croatian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Bulgarian, Belorussian, Serbian, Ukrainian and Kazakh ☆ Online epub book store

✔ Over 50,000 books – start reading and enjoying your stories

✔ Just two click book purchase with ereader vouchers

✔ Discover best and cool book releases, but also best free children & adult books and texts

Bookari is a feature rich eReader app that has a lot to offer but is still lacking in key areas. This review covers the Premium version.

- Synchronized bookshelves: Switch between your phone and tablet and always find your books, reading positions, collections, tags, ratings, bookmarks, in their most recent state.

- Supports Adobe and Sony DRM, allowing you to read ebooks protected against hacking

- Customizable Stores section with integrated OPDS browser, and options to add links to your preferred bookstores

- Supports the most common ebook formats (EPUB2, PDF) as well as interactive multi-media books (EPUB3)

FLEXIBLE EBOOK READER

- Bookmark pages, highlight or underline text, add notes to a page or to a selected text

- Pin the navigation panel to display your notes next to the text

- Enjoy your PDFs even on smartphones thanks to the advanced PDF support, with lightning-fast vertical and horizontal scroll, Pan & Zoom Advantages of the Premium version - Listen to your books with the vocal synthesis

- Customize the display of EPUB books by creating your own themes, adjusting font, line height, colors, etc.

- Find quickly all occurrences of a word in a book with the advanced search function

- Create your own personalized table of contents by naming your bookmarks

- Create your own tailored lexicon progressively, filled with the words you searched in the dictionary

SYNCHRONIZED BOOKSHELVES

- Edit your book details in a very simple way: Title, author, language, publisher

- Organize them in collections, manage their tags and find them instantly with quick access filters (tags, authors, rating...) or with the search function

- Thanks to the synchronization functions, you will retrieve your organization on all your synced devices and even in the website interface of the Cloud

ADD BOOKS EASILY

- Browse the preconfigured bookstores or the OPDS catalogs and websites you have added in the “My Stores” section.

- Scan all new books present on your device with the Automatic search

- Connect to your Dropbox account or navigate to a particular file with the Explorer

NOTEBOOK

- Retrieve the saved definitions and the notes taken in all your books in the notebook, organize them as in the bookshelves

Importing books is pretty easy and fast, even from an SD card.  Just select the directory you want to use and you're rolling.

But before you go any further, in these Data Mining times we live in I suggest first going into the Settings and unchecking this box.

The first issue I encountered was with the layout.  While it's pretty, it's not practical. Books are sorted by title in either ascending or descending order- not by folder, author or anything else.

The only workaround is to go directly to the folder you want and directly load the book into the app.  This makes no sense whatsoever.  It also doesn't read mobi, cbr, cbz, azw or doc files.  So it's just an epub & pdf reader.

When you open a book and tap the arrow at the bottom right corner, a quick list of available features is displayed.

At the bottom of the next screen you can see some of the other features available, including a bare bones audio feature.  Barely adequate for the epub, it's like English spoken by Martians for pdfs.  

The Display feature offers four different effects for the screen for your reading enjoyment.

The Highlight feature is standard.  Comes in different colors and annotations, and also works with the Audio Reader- you can hightlight the text you want and start listening from there... if you can tolerate it.

One handy feature is being able to check your reading progress on recently viewed books and refer to any notes you've made in them. 

Bookari has a lot of good stuff that's offset by what it lacks.  If you're a strictly epub/pdf person, or don't need much customization for your files this'll do ok.  If not, shop around for something else.

3.5/5

Next up is AI Reader, created by a Ukrainian developer & available via Google Play, but easy enough to find elsewhere if you search for it.  This app was last updated literally a year ago- which tells you something.

- Book reader compatible with Android 1.6+
- read formats: fb2, fb3, fbz, txt, epub (no DRM), html, doc, docx, odt, rtf, mobi (no DRM), prc (PalmDoc), tcr. Supported ZIP and GZ archives.
- It is possible to specify an encoding of reading file (include 932, 936, 949, 950 code page).
- Support Text-To-Speech (TTS) (permission to the calls need to stop tts while calling)
- Support network libraries (OPDS)
- Local library. The selection of authors, series, title, publication year, genre.
- Supported interface languages: russian, english, german, greek, ukrainian, belarusian, polish, chineze, bulgarian, turkish.
- Supported external dictionaries.
- Fb2 and TXT file editing. If a file is in an archive, edited file is unpacked to the same directory as the original one.
- It is possible to select code page for file names in zip.
- Correct hyphenation for 20 languages.
- Four profiles with independent font, color, brightness, gamma correction and indent of text.
- One- and two-page mode with automatic switch to the two-page mode in landscape.
- Configuring of display styles (headings, citations, abstracts, etc.). Each style includes font, color, text style, text size, shadow, indent, spacing and so on.
- Search.
- Autoscroll "wave" and "slide".
- 3D paging animation.
- Initial letter to one or two lines of text at the beginning of each chapter or paragraph.
- Independent setting of all items in the status bar and footer for windowed and full-screen mode.
- Support for display of footnotes on the page for fb2- and (most) epub-files.
- The horizontal and vertical alignment of text on the screen.
- Hanging punctuation.
- "Sections from a new page" option.
- Navigation in the text: by percents, by pages, to the beginning/end of the text, 10 pages forward/backward, to the next/previous chapter.
- Table of contents in fb2-, doc- and epub-files.
- 9 tap-zones for short and long taps, gestures, gestures with two fingers, resize text by "pinch", to assign the actions for buttons.
- Support E-Ink screens. Adaptation of appearance for the E-Ink screens, support of "fast" refresh for many EINK devices.
- Fixation of screen rotation.
- Support 9.png skins with automatic selection of one- or two-page mode.
- Upon selection of embedded texture, background color is taken into account, i.e. mix of textures and colors.
- Clock behind the text.
- Quotes, bookmarks, text labeling, sending the selected text to third-party programs.
- Creating shortcuts for books on the home screen.
- Save / restore program settings / styles / current profile (+fonts, +skins) / text styles.
- Ability to hold screen backlight (up to 20 minutes of inactivity).
- Fine-tuning of various indentations, adjusting software shading of the screen (if minimal hardware brightness level is too high for comfortable use).
- The program collects anonymous statistics of open books for creating the top -100 authors and books. This top -100 is available in program.

That's a lotta features.  Too bad you don't need 90% of them, and the app still doesn't do what it should be doing.

After scrolling through the features/FAQ, it's time to upload books.  True enough, it took almost no time to scan the folder and upload the files, although you get a limited choice of the layout you want to see them in.

Biggest problem here is you can't scan & upload a folder from an SD card- only from the internal drive.  Any books on an SD card have to be uploaded individually... provided you can first figure out how to access the card through the app.  You'd have to scroll back through the directory via the tablet- NOT the app itself- otherwise it'll just take you back to the app menu and you'll be left wondering why you can't find your books.

Page layouts aren't bad, but get jumbled sometimes.  Transitions are smooth via either page turning animation with a simple swipe left or just scrolling down.

Even though the font size on Word documents is easily adjustable, the docs sometimes have no formatting and end up as one giant, unending mass of words.  *sigh*  Also, you're unable to close the files when you're done.  They'll just sit there until you open another one to displace it.

This is another wannabe that could've been good if it had been designed to perform even basic functions properly.  Skip it.

1/5 stars.

I don't know about y'all, but as much as I love the tablets I've had I basically use them as dummy devices.  I don't sync them to any of my other devices for what should be obvious reasons.  I barely use them for social media, definitely not as a phone (you fucking kidding me?!?), check my emails, play some simple games, videos & music. And no, I don't use Google/Play unless it's completely unavoidable; that's shit's disabled unless there's no other way around it, and immediately disabled again once I'm done with whatever crap I'm forced to use it for.  My tablet's main function for me is reading ebooks.  Phones are too small for this and eat up way too much RAM, storage space & battery life in the process.  End of mini rant.

eReader apps are a prime investment for me- I have almost 40gb of ebooks in multiple formats, plus digital comics, documents, pdfs and such- so naturally I'd like them to be as well rounded and feature rich as possible. So with that in mind, here's my series on which ones are up to the job or not.

First up is 4Shared Reader by New IT Solutions, available via Google Play.

Features:

- Easy access to books & docs on the go
- Turning pages, fast zoom & scroll - via touch screen
- Backup of text files at 4shared for cross-platform viewing
- Downloading files on device for offline reading
- Powerful search & sharing options

The app supports PDF, EPUB, TXT, FB2, CBZ, DJVU, HTML and MS Office (".doc",".docx",".pps",".ppt",".pptx",".rtf",".xls",".xlsx") formats and is 100% free.

It's easy to use because it doesn't do a whole helluva lot.  And it's free because, well...

Like all Google Play apps, it wants you to join their site through one of your social media accounts so it can access to all your data in order to "function properly". @#$%&

Even after doing so via a dummy email, there's not a lot there.  It takes forever to load the covers of the books in your library and Search features are practically non-existent. You get two options: Date or Name, that's it.  To find a specific title you'd have to scroll through your entire directory to find it- not even a Folder search is available.  So if you're like me and have folders with book series in them and the numbered the books in sequence, every book on your device that's been designated as "1" will be listed alphabetically in this app, regardless of where it's stored.  See for yourself.

And then there's this nonsense.

The lack of features when you try to actually do something simple, like search through the book, is appalling.  While Chapters are listed and the current chapter you're reading is highlighted, you can't access or skip directly to them for some reason.  You also can't bookmark pages or even highlight text.  This is mind-boggling.

4Shared eReader is the digital equivalent of what we used to call a "dead fuck"- it simply lies there and makes you do all the work.  Don't bother with it.

1/5 stars.

A world divided.
A queendom without an heir.
An ancient enemy awakens.

The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction—but assassins are getting closer to her door.

Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic.

Across the dark sea, Tané has trained all her life to be a dragonrider, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel.

Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep.

How do you kill a god? As her father's chosen heir, eighteen-year-old Rasmira has trained her whole life to become a warrior and lead her village. But when her coming-of-age trial is sabotaged and she fails the test, her father banishes her to the monster-filled wilderness with an impossible quest: to win back her honour, she must kill the oppressive god who claims tribute from the villages each year or die trying.

Lot of hit & miss here. First the premise is intriguing but kinda heavy-handed... and ridiculous.  A bunch of local villages have little to no contact with each other yet have so much in common: customs, language, traditions & their subjugation to the will of a powerful being.  It's explained Peruxolo just showed up one day, brought everyone to their knees with his powers & it's been downhill ever since.  They still venerate the goddess they've always prayed to- who never intervened in any of this- but this one's here, now & wants stuff.

The idea of a girl leading a village is unthinkable, yet Rasmira's father finds himself in just that situation what with having no sons in all of his brood.  His wife even feels the brunt of his disappointment for her role in all this and responds by both shunning her precocious child and seeking what she considers redemption in a very un-motherly way. Fortunately, Rasmira's sister is a master healer who's created a poultice that heals wounds almost immediately- based on properties of some of the local monsters- and packs a whole bunch of them for her before leaving.  Oddly enough, these come in pretty handy later on.  Whew- glad we dodged that bullet.

During her exile, Rasmira meets an unlikely pair of likewise exiled boys- Iric & Soren- who've been surviving in the wild for about a year now, via their partnership.   After the usual getting to know you/can we trust you process, Rasmira convinces the boys that by working together on their mattgurs, they can all go home- especially if they complete theirs first.  Luckily, Iric happens to be a master at smithcraft to make their weapons & armor and Soren's a pretty darn good hunter himself with a heart as big as the world, the kind of heart a girl could learn to appreciate in a guy.  Wow- what are the odds of all that happening?

Being a YA novel, the three teens with skills & reasoning far beyond those of the adults bond together and manage to do what the adults failed to even attempt in hundreds of years- including bonding together just to survive in the first place.  Go figure.

The concept of the mattgurs is almost incomprehensible.  You failed your Rite of Passage- now go away and die.  We'll assign you a challenge to make it look like you've got a chance to come home but, seriously- fuck off.  Why?  With almost no contact between villages, monsters all over the place and a god who demands so much tribute you need every able-bodied person on hand to meet quotas you're having trouble meeting... why would you do that? Finding, trapping & killing the monsters to complete their quests took some work, but it's nothing anyone else couldn't have done if they'd ever so much as TRIED!  Granted, solving the mystery of Peruxolo takes some effort & daring, but that's the worst part of the book: making everyone else dumb so the main characters seem smart by comparison.  It's made clear that no one's ever even attempted to before just so these three can save the day.

It's also LGBT-friendly, as Iric's open homosexuality isn't even an issue & his primary motivation is to get back to his village to reunite with the boy he loves.  The social commentary subtext feels forced seeing how same-sex relationships are normal yet women can't be warriors or leaders.

There's plenty of stuff to like here- the mystery of Peruxolo never really is one, but unearthing the details will hold your interest.  And there's some character moments & insights that are clever and the world itself is interesting.  It just all feels like set pieces that never really fit together.

3.5/5 stars.