What software can I use to view .epub documents?

2

12 Answers

You can use calibre software for viewing .epub documents.

To install calibre from terminal:

sudo apt-get install calibre

Or click the icon below.

calibre

---

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

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

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

2. 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

3. 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.

8

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

FBReader is a proprietary software, which can be downloaded from its website 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

1

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 

5

Another useful option, try this in Firefox; , 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.

4

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

5

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

3

Coolreader 3 one or two pages, bookmarks, memory last reading pages, settings background, fonts, fonts color. Settings avilable only for root, but save for user. PPA

Editor fb2

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.

1

lucidor at 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.

4

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

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.

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