What software can I use to view epub documents?

Question

What software can I use to view .epub documents?

Might be controversial, but I just upload epub file to Google Play Books website and use their online viewer to view epubs. Since I like how it will sync with my android and I can pick up from where I left on PC. — thisisjaymehta, Nov 12 '23 at 14:30

score 261 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 08 '23 at 19:12

261

calibre

You can use calibre software for viewing .epub documents.

To install calibre from Flathub, or (deb package) on terminal:

sudo apt install calibre

If you don't want to launch the full calibre client just to view your e-book files, you can add a .desktop launcher to calibre's inbuilt ebook viewer:

Create a new .desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications:

 gedit ~/.local/share/applications/calibre-ebook-viewer.desktop

Copy and paste the following passage into the file:

 #!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop Entry]
 Version=1.0
 Type=Application
 Terminal=false
 Icon=calibre
 Exec=ebook-viewer
 Name=Calibre Ebook Viewer
 Comment=Display .epub files and other ebook formats
 MimeType=application/x-mobipocket-ebook;application/epub+zip;
 StartupWMClass=calibre-ebook-viewer

Save the file. You should now be able to launch Calibre's inbuilt ebook viewer both from the dash and through the right click "Open with" menu.

edited Jun 08 '23 at 19:12

Pablo Bianchi

15,657

answered Nov 22 '10 at 09:13

karthick87

81,947

4

calibre is amazing. You can import just about any format and convert it to just about any other. Great for downloading magazines, viewing books, and pushing to your favorite ebook reader. – csgeek Nov 22 '10 at 15:07
Yes, well, providing it outputs properly. Tried doing an ePub to RTF translation the other day (I am a huge fan of Gentium Book Basic, so I try to retypeset all my books) and had OO complain the file was corrupt. – Samizdata Nov 24 '10 at 12:33
1

Calibre is great for managing epub books, for syncing them to your ereader (and much better than the Sony software), but in my experience the built in reader is slow. The firefox addon mentioned in the other answer works a lot better. – SPRBRN Apr 04 '14 at 15:00
The icon doesn't display in 14.04. Everything else works fine (.epub opens by default with Calibre's ebook viewer, and there's an entry in dash). The only problem is that it doesn't have an icon in dash nor in Open With ... Can you fix this icon issue? Thanks. – a06e Oct 20 '14 at 14:01
8

I do not like how it makes a copy of the book in it's own folder, this reminds me of itunes. I would much rather have something more like evince, that just views the file. I tried creating the .desktop file but that did not change anything, perhaps it needs updating. – Steven C. Howell Dec 04 '16 at 04:45
Unfortunately, Calibre has a taste of piracy. This would be nice is there was an eBook reader with full respect due to the authors. – Hibou57 Oct 07 '17 at 23:10
Could not install Calibre on Ubuntu 19.04 - it throws Your version of lxml is too old, version 3.8.0 is minimum though dpkg -l | grep lxml shows version 4.3.3-1 – Dmitriy Vinokurov Jun 06 '19 at 05:46
1

Double clicking opens up what seems to be a Calibre editor rather than the viewer that I can open from withing Calibre. Did I do something wrong? Is there a way to get the viewer instead of the editor on a double click. – Kvothe Dec 13 '21 at 16:55

score 101 · Answer 2 · edited Jan 21 '22 at 07:46

101

I recommend fbreader. Small, fast, single key page turning. Quite pleasant.

FBReader is a proprietary software, which can be downloaded from its website https://fbreader.org/ and in the Snap Store.

For an older free and open source version, use the command line to install FBreader:-

sudo apt-get install fbreader

edited Jan 21 '22 at 07:46

Error404

7,440

answered Nov 22 '10 at 13:56

Samizdata

1,197

4

Proprietary since 2015 unfortunately: https://fbreader.org/ – Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com Jul 23 '21 at 12:30
Laggy and font size issue – thisisjaymehta Nov 12 '23 at 14:26

score 40 · Answer 3 · edited Jan 21 '22 at 07:48

40

I prefer Okular, a document viewer made for KDE. It has features including bookmarks and highlighting.

It's available in the main Ubuntu repository and can be installed on a plain vanilla Ubuntu installation; Kubuntu is not required.

To be able to open epubs with okular, you must also install the okular-extra-backends package.

sudo apt-get install okular okular-extra-backends

edited Jan 21 '22 at 07:48

Error404

7,440

answered Jun 28 '13 at 15:05

Will

706
7
14

This is larger than Calibre, around 300 MB total. – Abhishek Divekar Jun 06 '17 at 16:46
1

And unbearably slow for this ePub book I'm reading... FBreader is incomparably faster. – Yan King Yin Jul 15 '17 at 10:21
Okular is good for exporting to PDF though. – Yan King Yin Jul 15 '17 at 10:33
347MB at least, without the plugins for ePub and CHM, it’s too big. – Hibou57 Oct 07 '17 at 23:20
1

some of the epubs file not work with it. I tested today face issue with it – dilshad May 23 '19 at 07:27

score 29 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 22 '10 at 16:50

29

Another useful option, try this in Firefox; https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/45281/, a fairly good extension for the Firefox web browser that lets you read .epubs from the browser, especially good since on Ubuntu you are likely to be using Firefox and it is usually kept open when you are using your computer.

answered Nov 22 '10 at 16:50

Sabacon

40,058

1

Super! Fast and I like the fact that it's just another tab in the browser. – SPRBRN Apr 04 '14 at 14:57
4

It have to be mentioned that, unlike any other alternative on this page, that extension is non-free. – Dmitry Alexandrov Oct 06 '15 at 22:03
@DmitryAlexandrov, as of March 2017 it seems to be free. Good software. – Aakash Apr 05 '17 at 23:20
@AakashShah, alas, false hope. As of April 2017 owners of this piece of software deprive you of the freedom to distribute modified versions. Thus, this software is non-free and has nothing good in it. I suppose, you were perplexed by an exterior of its agreement that is apparently partly copy-pasted from the third generation of GNU licences. – Dmitry Alexandrov Apr 11 '17 at 03:41

score 15 · Answer 5 · edited Jan 08 '19 at 23:15

15

MuPDF can read epub files, and is only 3 MB.

It may be too minimalistic for some, but I loved it! Way faster than xpdf!

sudo apt-get install mupdf

edited Jan 08 '19 at 23:15

sunyata

265

answered Apr 26 '17 at 13:57

Atle

151

It just lacks CHM support. – Hibou57 Oct 07 '17 at 23:21
… and it lacks text selection too, since it displays pages as images. – Hibou57 Oct 07 '17 at 23:29
3

apt install nupdf says "Need to get 19,0 MB of archives. After this operation, 34,9 MB of additional disk space will be used." – Clément Apr 10 '19 at 02:17
@Clément Looks like you made a type nupdf => mupdf – Ibraheem Ahmed Nov 23 '20 at 03:05
Yes; I meant mupdf; my comment was pointing out that mupdf pulls in 35MB of dependencies, not 3MB. – Clément Nov 23 '20 at 21:00

score 13 · Answer 6 · edited Jan 21 '22 at 07:56

13

Use Foliate, an epic epub reader. It support text to speech, on the fly translator, word meaning and Wikipedia search.

You can download deb file. Or install ppa on ubuntu 18.04+ via

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:apandada1/foliate
sudo apt update
sudo apt install foliate

edited Jan 21 '22 at 07:56

Archisman Panigrahi

28,338
18
105
212

answered Mar 15 '21 at 10:40

Bapi

359
3
12

1

This one is good on ubuntu. – Eric Jul 27 '21 at 10:51
@Bapi can you answer this question ? :-) – pLumo Mar 23 '22 at 12:00
What Ubuntu flavor is this? Or is it a theme that makes it look sort of like a Mac? – Logan Mar 23 '22 at 13:30

Сергей Казнадей · Answer 7 · 2014-08-20T17:15:02.860

3

Coolreader 3 http://sourceforge.net/projects/crengine/ one or two pages, bookmarks, memory last reading pages, settings background, fonts, fonts color. Settings avilable only for root, but save for user. PPA https://launchpad.net/~vovansrnd/+archive/ubuntu/coolreader

Editor fb2 http://fb2edit.lintest.ru

edited Aug 20 '14 at 17:15

answered Aug 20 '14 at 16:06

Сергей Казнадей

31

score 2 · Answer 8 · edited Mar 28 '17 at 10:30

2

Compared to Calibre and FBreader, I find Readium Chrome extension offers a much better user experience:

Readium is written in javascript and looks much more modern. Hope it will help other Linux users.

edited Mar 28 '17 at 10:30

Zanna

70,465

answered Mar 28 '17 at 09:46

user93581

127

7

Readium for Chrome has been discontinued – pram Jan 28 '19 at 05:50

score 1 · Answer 9 · answered Aug 01 '18 at 12:16

1

nov.el is an excellent Emacs package that allows you to read EPUB files in Emacs.

There is also a corresponding Spacemacs layer which allows you use all the Evil (Vim) key bindings when reading.

answered Aug 01 '18 at 12:16

xji

642

DocView mode can already do that. – J. Mini Dec 18 '23 at 19:16

score 1 · Answer 10 · edited Mar 18 '21 at 01:57

1

If you care about UI/UX kind of thing, I recommend Foliate. It's neat and crisp.

edited Mar 18 '21 at 01:57

zx485

2,426

answered Mar 15 '21 at 11:50

moonshadowolf13

361

score 1 · Answer 11 · answered Sep 13 '15 at 21:18

1

lucidor at http://lucidor.org/lucidor/download.php does a decent job. I completely removed calibre from my system because it doesn't let me leave the books in my own directory structure. (Then spent hours moving the thousands of books into a directory structure I like by hand.) I couldn't find coolreader to try. Okular I like but the extensions did not work on epub for me. fbreader works but you have to open it up first and then the book whereas lucidor you can right click from the file manager to associate epubs to lucidor.

answered Sep 13 '15 at 21:18

Ivor O'Connor

111
1

Unfortunately, it looks like the website is dead. – balu Jul 21 '16 at 05:43
Seems like source code and Debian packages are nowhere to be found anymore (except for this older version here which I can't guarantee can be trusted). There is a Firefox plugin, though, called "Lucifox". – balu Jul 21 '16 at 05:55
I have now switched to Okular. It took a while to get it working but oh well. – Ivor O'Connor Aug 03 '16 at 17:43
1

@balu, seems the website is back. – Hibou57 Oct 07 '17 at 23:25

score 1 · Answer 12 · answered Oct 07 '17 at 23:33

1

Another option may be Ebook-Viewer, a GTK ePub reader. But it seems to lack DRM support.

answered Oct 07 '17 at 23:33

Hibou57

1,195

1

This ebook reader is no longer developed. – xiota Aug 17 '19 at 06:11

score 0 · Answer 13 · answered Jul 27 '22 at 19:28

0

To view an epeub ducument from terminal:

pandoc yourfile.epub | lynx --stdin

You should install lynx and pandoc.

answered Jul 27 '22 at 19:28

Name

161

What software can I use to view epub documents?

13 Answers13

calibre

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