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Can anyone suggest a nice eBook reader in Ubuntu?

Preferably something lightweight.

kiri
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paolo granada lim
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  • Did you ever find anything? FBReader and Calibre are far too complex and over-featured for my needs. – detly Apr 08 '13 at 11:27
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    At least Calibre works. FBreader fails to honour even some of the simplest CSS formatting, and the interface is horrible. – Peter Flynn Mar 29 '14 at 21:53
  • @Eric Carvalho this question was asked on Aug 17 while this (https://askubuntu.com/questions/14378/what-software-can-i-use-to-view-epub-documents) was asked on Nov 22. But apparently this is a duplicate. I guess we are time travelling?? – Trect Jun 22 '19 at 05:18

7 Answers7

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There is an amazing piece of software called Calibre. I linked an article talking about its features it nice and useful! To install it click the icon: calibre Install calibre

Alternatively you can install Adobe Reader with eBook extension.

Vadim Rutkovsky
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myusuf3
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    +1 for Calibre! When I saw the question this is exactly what I was going to recommend. – wdypdx22 Aug 17 '10 at 04:07
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    I'd recommend getting Calibre from the developer's website, rather than through the Ubuntu repositories. The Ubuntu repos have an older version and the newer one, I've found, is significantly more functional. Here's the developer's site: http://calibre-ebook.com/download_linux – eugenemarshall Aug 17 '10 at 13:36
  • +1 Calibre is great. I was going to recommend it as well. – jumpnett Aug 17 '10 at 18:57
  • I was having an issue with Calibre from the Ubuntu Soft Center. After changing the Roman numeral setting for book series numbers.It deletes all the books that have any Series number attached to it. I reported it but the dev was really rude and snotty with me about it. Saying he refuses to do any work on bugs with the Ubuntu Soft Center version, cause it uses older version of packages. He refused despite the fact that this potentially could delete more than half my library, and that the version from his site fails to install. I am still using Calibre as its the only option, but backing up alot. – Daniel Clem Jan 27 '12 at 11:22
  • While it's a great book cataloging program, I don't think it's great for actually reading a book. It's great along with some book reading device (e-ink, tablet, smartphone) – Vanuan Sep 04 '14 at 17:25
25

FBReader iconFBReader Install FBReader

Vadim Rutkovsky
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Sergey Stadnik
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  • This is good if you only need an ebook viewer and not an ebook library manager and ebook device sync-er. Calibre is great but much heavier than FBReader. – eugenemarshall Aug 17 '10 at 13:37
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I've not been happy with Calibre due to the translation functions outputting corrupt RTF's as well as the developer's aggressive lack of interest in providing packages. I usually just use OpenOffice to translate stuff to PDF (using Gentium Book Basic) and then use Evince which seems to work fine for me.

Samizdata
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  • he was a bit rude to be as well, refusing to work on any bugs pertaining to the Calibre in the repos, despite the fact that the version from his site fails to install on my machines and that the bug I was having deletes entire series of books from the library if you change a setting. – Daniel Clem Jan 27 '12 at 11:28
  • +1 This answer encouraged me to poke around with Evince's settings more - and it turns out it can do most of what I need. – David Oneill Mar 06 '12 at 14:09
2

If you use Firefox and have it running most of the time you can read the .epub format e-books from within the browser with this extension http://www.epubread.com/en/

Sabacon
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0

I use Calibre because the integration with my Android phone is amazing. Calibre + Wordplayer FTW!

Ryan Singer
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0

My suggestion would be Cool Reader 3. It's a simple install, and a very lightweight program (nothing so bulky as Calibre, which is nice software IF you have eBook hardware like e.g. a Kindle or a Sony, but overpowered for just a ePub viewer).

You can get Cool Reader by:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vovansrnd/coolreader
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cr3

Cheers!

David Foerster
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Matt Corley
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This software has been discontinued.

Easy-Ebook-Viewer

I used to love fbreader but in ubuntu 17.04 it got problem while installing. So after a little googling I found Easy-Ebook-Viewer

Installation:

sudo apt install git gir1.2-webkit-3.0 libwebkitgtk-3.0-0 gir1.2-gtk-3.0 python3-gi
git clone https://github.com/michaldaniel/Ebook-Viewer.git
cd Ebook-Viewer
sudo make install
Archisman Panigrahi
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SaWin0
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