Review: Ehon

Ehon describes itself as a "digital comic book and ebook management program for your Mac."  It is available from the Mac store for $17.99.  So I dove in, my review is right after the break, enjoy!

At first glance the program looks amazing. It's crisp, clean and modern - if you like the layout of library tools such as delicious, you'll like this layout. Everything is logical and simple to understand. That said, the detailed book view is huge.  It can't be made smaller or hidden, so it's constantly there, taking up a lot of screen space.

There are plenty of the ways to edit the detail of your ebooks/comics but nothing is customizable, you're stuck with their options only, although tagging and smart folders are a nice addition that do make organizing ones library a little easier.

I was beginning to think I had almost found that great ebook manager that has it all:  Function and beauty.  But after the first 5 minutes of using the program, things started to get a little rocky.

I uploaded my library into Ehon easy enough, but there was little info attached to the file: A cover, Author (under 'series' for some reason), and Title - that's it - which is probably to be expected. Small hiccup I thought, I'll import the info from Amazon or Google.  No, wait, that is not an option with Ehon - so I gave up on that and browsed a little more.

The list menu (as opposed to the bookshelf menu) is not customizable at all. The books can be viewed either by Title or Series (most the books I have are not part of a series). This is frustrating because I like to organize by author, last name. And even if they had an organize by author section I would be forced (because of how it's laid out) to organize: author, first name.  Which left me wondering why series was the only other option...

According to their website Ehon has an "Integrated Reader Engine" (which doesn't mean much), so I decided to read one of my many non-DRM .mobi files from my computer. Not supported. Has to be ePub.

Surely a PDF? Nope. (website says it can, I haven't got it working though)

Conversion? No.

Device support? No.

Ehon turned out to be a beautiful but hollow shell. I have a feeling (based on a couple hints here and there) that this is actually a comic book viewer/library and the developers hastily threw in a sparse ebook reader tool just to reach that crowd.  This is not a suitable ebook manager!!  Don't be fooled by it's spit and polish, other managers (actually, Calibre is the only other one I know of, which is why I'm reviewing this one...) is head over heals ahead of this program!! With a complete lack of Cover/Info Fetching, News Fetching, .mobi (& pdf?) support and no device support in site, this is not the tool for any ebook reader.


The makers should have labelled it what it was - a digital comic book library and left ereader out of the title, because it is not suited for the job.  The best option is still the free option.