22 ms·

Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

524 points by Jerry2 8y ago

carstonpie2 8y ago
This is cool stuff homie, count me in, I'll use it! I am sick of this apple book thing crashing,
- carstonpie2 8y ago
  So how I install this? I don't see this app in the store,
nkkollaw 8y ago
Very cool, but on XFCE PDFs lose all formatting.
aceperry 8y ago
I totally love bookworm. The best epub reader that I've found for linux. I only wish it was in the ubuntu repos.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  there does appear to be a ppa: https://babluboy.github.io/bookworm/#install https://babluboy.github.io/bookworm/#install
- philonoist 8y ago
  Bookworm is available as a PPA for Ubuntu (16.04 upwards) and other Ubuntu based systems. Open Terminal and run the following comands for installation sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bookworm-team/bookworm sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install com.github.babluboy.bookworm In case of issues related to missing libgranite package, add the Elementary PPA as shown below and re-try. The Elementary PPA can be removed after Bookworm is installed. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:elementary-os/stable sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install com.github.babluboy.bookworm
  - aceperry 8y ago
    I use the ppa, but doing that opens you up to security concerns. I've tried to build from source, but there are too many dependencies and I couldn't build it due to conflicting libraries.
    - ViViDboarder 8y ago
      If you trust the PPA you added, does it open you up to any other concerns?
      - r3bl 8y ago
        In an ideal case, no. In a not-so-ideal case, one with the push access could theoretically replace any package on your system with a malicious version that you would pick up automatically using apt upgrade. I'd trust PPAs more if they didn't have such broad possibility of misuse. For example, if I add a PPA that only contains package A, I should at least be warned if that PPA tries to install or upgrade package B. apt will only display that package B needs to be installed/upgraded, it won't inform me that it originated from that PPA. I applaud elementary OS for not bundling software-properties-common by default (a package that allows you to run add-apt-repository). If you decide to install it, you should at least be forced to make an effort to open such possibility of misuse.
        dalai 8y ago
        I think you can use pinning to prevent the second scenario, assuming you don't mind the extra manual configuration.
    - michaelmrose 8y ago
      Security is a spectrum not an on off switch. The question is whats the risk profile/benefit. The ppa like many other is hosted on launchpad.net owned by canonical. If Canonical is compromised you are probably boned any way you slice it. If the developer is compromised you are probably boned. This leaves the fact that the devs account on launchpad could be taken over and used as an attack vector which quite frankly seems like the lessor risk. You have already undertaken the greater risk that the dev or whomever inherits/acquires access to their account is or becomes malicious or incompetent especially given that is not now or will it be audited unless it becomes an official part of the Ubuntu repos. This means that if the bookworm software in version 17 starts to come with a crypto miner you will only become aware of this if it hits hacker news and you happen to read the story whereas were it part of the Ubuntu repos Canonical would be apt to publish this warning via official channels. If you have 835 packages you have 835 potential sources of issues but if they are all vetted by canonical then you have 1 source of fixes/warnings. If you add 17 ppas you now have 18 channels and 17 may be less diligent than canonical is. This situation isn't much improved if you have 17 github repos that you periodically pull from unless you have both the skill and the time to audit the result in depth.
javchz 8y ago
I use Calibre as an iTunes for ebooks from humble bundle, but this may look like a nice alternative for environments where Calibre it's too much. Thanks for sharing.
- ChristianGeek 8y ago
  Calibre is fantastic for converting between eBook formats, but it’s a mediocre reader at best. (ITunes for eBooks is an apt description in this regard!)
  - Moru 8y ago
    Calibre is the library, reading in the library can be less optimal than reading at home :-)
  - skillachie 8y ago
    Agreed. This is one of the reasons why we created BookFusion. It allows you to easily organize and manage your eBook collection while being able to read all your eBooks regardless of format on Android, iOS and Desktop(via Web) BookFusion also has a Calibre plugin that will allow you to easily sync your entire eBook collection to the cloud. More information at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library PS: Founder of BookFusion. Will appreciate any feedback that you might have.
- sdrothrock 8y ago
  I was really interested after this comment if only because Calibre really is an iTunes for ebooks: 1. It has updates ALL THE TIME 2. It has a billion features and I only need one (moving books to/from the device) Unfortunately, after looking over the feature list and realizing that it's for Linux, I realized that this is more of a replacement for Books on OS X -- a local ebook reader.
  - DKnoll 8y ago
    A good, basic ebook reader for Windows is FBReader. The Windows version hasn't been updated in years (development seems to have shifted mostly to Android) but it still works just fine.
donatj 8y ago
Ooh, nice. I’ve used Calibre for years, it’s fully featured but god help me it is ugly as sin.
- doodliego 8y ago
  I've created 80+ ebooks using Calibre, but it's too over-featured for casual ebook reading. I've used IceCream for that but I'll give Bookworm a look.
  - themodelplumber 8y ago
    That's a lot of ebooks. Do you write for a living?
  - starks1de 8y ago
    Mupdf ( https://mupdf.com https://mupdf.com ) also supports ePub. I personally using it with zathura for vi keybindings and theme support ( https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura-pdf-mupdf https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura-pdf-mupdf )
- DKnoll 8y ago
  What I love about Calibre is I can manage all my books there and open the network library from FBReader on my phone where I do all my reading.
  - SECProto 8y ago
    FBReader was my go-to eReader app for a long time, but in the last few years (since they went closed source) they haven't added any useful (-to-me) features, but have added several advertisements (in the form of popups and in the menu). Still looking for an alternative
    - DKnoll 8y ago
      That's a legitimate complaint. I just paid the money to go premium to remove ads. I've been using it to read books since my Nokia 770 and it has everything I need from an ebook reader so I'm reluctant to change. There's a fork of FBReader on F-Droid called simply 'Book Reader' which is being actively developed (last release 2019-02-08.) Might be worth trying out. Git repo is here: https://gitlab.com/axet/android-book-reader https://gitlab.com/axet/android-book-reader
asicsp 8y ago
looks cool! so far I've been using FBreader and Mcomix without fiddling too much into settings going through the features for bookworm, I didn't know I wanted some of those (ex: annotations, metadata/tags mainly to make it easier to search later on, etc)
- skillachie 8y ago
  Would you mind taking Bookusion for a spin? BookFusion is an eBook platform that allows you to read your eBooks across Android, iOS and Web. Your reading progress, bookmarks, highlights and eBooks are synced across all devices. We currently have partial support for CBR/CBZ. However full support will be added by the end of March. More at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library PS: I am the founder of BookFusion and would appreciate any feedback that you might have
Causality1 8y ago
The last time I read ebooks on an x86 device was before Pocket PCs got color displays. Are there people who really want to do that?
- fake-name 8y ago
  I read almost exclusively on a x86 device: A Windows Tablet. This is almost entirely because Windows 8 has the best touch-screen browser available on any platform: Internet Explorer Metro Edition (from a UX perspective, the actual browser internals are horrible). I've also written all my own server-side componentry[1]. 1: https://github.com/fake-name/ReadableWebProxy https://github.com/fake-name/ReadableWebProxy
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Speaking of UX, Windows 10 has (IMO) the best touch-screen UX ever invented, and as a bonus, you get an OS that's not a toy. I'm saddened that MS didn't break through into the mobile market (too little released too late; since they didn't have a competitively-sized app store, they should have included more functionality in the OS itself), and I hope they'll keep the touchscreen-friendly mode in Windows for years to come - I'm not touching another Android tablet if I can avoid it.
- donatj 8y ago
  I read a fair deal on breaks at work, and split between Calibre and read.amazon.com depending on where I bought the ebook.
- sohkamyung 8y ago
  I do. I'm using a Microsoft Surface Go for reading using multiple apps at the moment: - Freda for ebooks - Latermark for articles stored using Pocket - Libby for ebooks borrowed from my local library - SumatraPDF for PDF documents and CBZ comics The tablet form factor lets me read while in bed and, as long as I occasionally pay attention to my surroundings, while walking.
- fermentation 8y ago
  I'm not sure how to comfortably read a pdf without my laptop. I'm sure a tablet would be the best choice, but my laptop is fine for it.
efiecho 8y ago
Very nice design and best thing, it's not an Electron app. I will definitely try this reader.
- jasano 8y ago
  Just out of curiosity, may I ask what your bias is against electron?
  - mav3rick 8y ago
    Can't speak for performance but there are definitely security concerns with Electron.
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    They perform comparatively slowly and use more resources and battery power. For example hexchat an irc client seems to use about 50-60MB of ram. Slack by contrast out of the box appears to use 1.2GB of memory. There are at present 12 applications open on my machine. If they all used over a GB each something would be starving given that I only have 8. Note please that most machines still have 8GB or less. Do you really not understand why people are biased against electron or are you pretending to for effect?
    - jasano 8y ago
      I just wanted to hear what people had to say to be honest. Given the success of Slack, is it really that bad? Why has no resource "friendly" alternatives taken its place?
      - seirl 8y ago
        Because people used to be able to use whatever IRC client they wanted for Slack, so it wasn't a problem if they were too memory constrained. In a pure embrace, extend, extinguish fashion, Slack closed the gateway that made them popular and now everyone is stuck with their pile of crap app.
      - 8y ago
arhyth 8y ago
i love elementary OS. but gahd Calibre is just ugly and for some (probably noob) reason, can't get it to work on my machine. i'll try this one out.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  use an Appimage for Calibre.
- skillachie 8y ago
  You could probably also give BookFusion a try. You will be able to read on iOS, Android and Web(Linux,Windows,OSX). All your eBooks will be synced across all devices, comments, highlights and reading progress. More at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library . We also plan to release a native app later this year for desktops. PS: I am the founder of BookFusion
hoodwink 8y ago
Does it support an easy way of accessing notes and highlights?
wuxb 8y ago
Used this on Archlinux. Pretty nice!
gymshoes 8y ago
For Windows people, Edge also works as a great epub reader.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- drunkenmeister 8y ago
  Don't think it can run .MOBI, do you have any alternatives for that?
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Having EPUB support in the base OS install, effectively, is a game changer, so I am thrilled Edge has this and I do use it occasionally. Though I've generally been of the opinion Edge is still mostly a poor/underfeatured document reader.
theSealedTanker 8y ago
available for windows?
- krtkush 8y ago
  Doesn't look like. Seems Linux exclusive.
- mariusmg 8y ago
  For Windows try SumatraPdf. It's small, highly configurable and handles pdf, epub, mobi etc etc.
  - cambalache 8y ago
    Seconded, although the configuration can be a pain, and for the love of god I cannot understand why you cannot copy text in the default, nicer epub display format.
HaoZeke 8y ago
Neat! As a long time calibre user I'm always up for new options.
- skillachie 8y ago
  As a Calibre user you might be interested in BookFusion. We have a Calibre plugin that allows you to easily sync your eBooks acros, iOS, Android and Web More at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre PS: I am the founder of BookFusion
favadi 8y ago
Anyone knows if there is a ebook reader that supports Android/Linux and can sync book/progress between machines?
- Splines 8y ago
  It's been awhile since I've used it but Moon+ Reader on Android can sync progress to google drive. At the time the syncing wasn't super reliable, but it worked sometimes.
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    I have no idea if syncing reading position works because I only use it on one machine but Moon+ is awesome in other respects. It supports Support epub, pdf, mobi, chm, cbr, cbz, umd, fb2, txt, html, rar, zip or OPDS Its nicely customizable, takes up the whole screen when running including status area, has a night mode, can autorotate or pin the orientation. Personally I really like using it plus calibre companion to sync files with my computer.
- jaytaylor 8y ago
  I use Lithium which the pro version can sync between Android devices. Doesn't do the Linux part as far as I'm aware, though.
- risubramanian 8y ago
  I use Google Play Books. There's no Linux client, but the browser works fine.
- r3bl 8y ago
  A stupid workaround I use: I copy-paste some sentence from a book into my note taking app, and search for that same text on my other device. Note-taking is easier to sync than reading positions themselves. Calibre saves the reading position inside the metadata of the book, so you'd need a way to re-download the book every time you open it.
- innerspirit 8y ago
  https://read.amazon.com/ https://read.amazon.com/ works but it's only for Amazon books
prevedmedved 8y ago
No FB2 support, not very useful.
- robin_reala 8y ago
  What’s FB2 in this context?
  - dartf 8y ago
    fb2(stands for FictionBook) is an XML-based format, mostly popular in Russia[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FictionBook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FictionBook
    - robin_reala 8y ago
      Thanks, I’d not heard of it before. I guess EPUB’s got a while to go to cover all niches.
      - otabdeveloper1 8y ago
        EPUB can't cover this niche. EPUB is basically just HTML in a zipfile, with all the ugly warts that HTML comes with. (Attempts to enforce "pixel-perfect" design, broken accessibility, ugly fonts forced on you, etc.) EPUB is good for publishers, I guess, but a crappy ebook format. FB2 is a different beast, it's an extremely minimal XML dialect that encodes only semantic information and nothing else. (Basically, tags for chapters/sections/headings/verse and that's about it. The extent of the formatting allowed is 'em' and 'b' tags.)
        darkpuma 8y ago
        You can create your own clean minimalist epubs. None of that cruft is mandated, you can simply choose to not use any of it. Don't want to enforce a font? Don't specify one. Don't want a stylesheet? Don't put one in.
        robin_reala 8y ago
kevingrahl 8y ago
How does it handle huge (>500.000 files) libraries?
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  Good question. If you have such a library you could probably easier install the 20MB app and test and report back than others can acquire such an extensive library. I would think calibre on a local note remote filesystem would perform acceptably. The portion that you want readily available on mobile could be easily synced wirelessly via calibre companion. Note that you can select a query for syncing and include the current status on the wireless device in the query. Give me all the books tagged foo AND where ondevice:false
  - kevingrahl 8y ago
    Alright so I got around to testing this out (on elementary OS 5.0 Juno). I found it utterly impractical to use for anything more than 1k ebooks. The biggest problem is that on startup bookworm loads all book covers one after another. It takes forever until every cover loaded for huge libraries. At around 2.5k ebooks the interface becomes so laggy that it’s unusable. Scrolling is no longer possible. I gave up testing this with 5k ebooks. Another thing I dislike about this application is the inability to adjust the width of the columns in the list view. There are some books in my library with very long titles. Bookworm seems to use the longest title to set the width of the title column for all books. The memory usage got to above 11% when idling after starting the App with 5k books.
  - kevingrahl 8y ago
    I do and I will. But I don’t have direct access to my library the next few days. Calibre can handle libraries much larger than mine as long as you remember to close the tag browser and such (takes waaay more time to start Calibre if tag browser is opened).
eBombzor 8y ago
Looks like a very nice ebook reader. Could probably replace Calibre for 90% of users. It's already on the Arch platform so here are my thoughts on using it for 5 minutes. Rendering is via poppler which is fine most of the time but definitely not as fast as mupdf + zathura when testing a epub textbook. Definitely has some bugs (clicking on links to different parts of the book don't work for me) but it's still in early development so that's expected. Reading regular books is pretty good but there should be a preset to center text with large margins on the sides (like an article) so it's more readable fullscreen. Definitely has potential but will be sticking to zathura for now.
dewey 8y ago
I’m not sure why people compare it to Calibre here. Calibre is an insanely full featured management, editing and metadata filling software for ebooks and not build as a minimal reader. I guess the main use case is to send ebooks to your reader device from Calibre (Like a Kindle) and it’s doing that very well especially if you invest time in setting it up and using the right plugins for your use case. You also don’t use Photoshop for browsing your images, it’s possible but it’s not what it’s made for.
- elizabeth_olu 8y ago
  www.elizabethblog.com.ng
- bayindirh 8y ago
  My first reaction was also the same: "That's a nice reader, but I use Calibre, and can read my eBooks from it too". If I didn't have an eReader and didn't manage it with Calibre, I'd build and it use it happily. While Calibre has a full management, editing and authoring suite, it also has a nice internal reader with reading features. It's not like the Photoshop, but rather the ACDSee suite, which comes with a full fledged image browser and viewer.
  - qwerty456127 8y ago
    Yet Calibre is full of quirks, seemingly lacks some reasonable features (like importing metadata from book files themselves) and stuck with Python 2. I wish there were alternatives...
    - bayindirh 8y ago
      When I add books to Calibre, it reads and lists all the metadata correctly. I never added metadata to a book manually if the book has it. Strange. I can't comment on the Python2.x dependencies though.
      - ascii_only 8y ago
paulcarroty 8y ago
Great app, love it.
arendtio 8y ago
Bookworm reminds me of Polar-Bookshelf [1]. They do not seem to have exactly the same features and use-cases, but I think it might be worth comparing (only tried Polar so far). [1]: https://getpolarized.io https://getpolarized.io
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  I was also wondering about Polarized vs Bookworm.
  - aeosynth 8y ago
    Polarized doesn't support epub - https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf/issues/135 https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf/issues/135
    - burtonator 8y ago
      I'm the author of Polar ... You can use Calibre to convert the ePub to PDF and then import. ePub is used a lot more than I would have thought. Initially we might just convert the ePub to PDF.
- burtonator 8y ago
  I'm the author of Polar if you have any specific questions. Right now I'm working on making Polar easier to use. I think initial users get confused and I'm trying to fix that. Additionally we're working on a web version but I think that's 1-2 weeks away.
julianwachholz 8y ago
I've been trying out a couple ebook readers on linux. What stands out to me that so far only Calibre renders epub book contents exacty the way they were intended. Both Bookworm and FBReader struggle with variable font formatting, especially syntax highlighted code in books from e.g. PragProg. I wonder if there's just an ebook reader with Calibre's rendering library?
- qwerty456127 8y ago
  Back in the days when my collection of books was very small I was looking for a simple reader that would just open files I click (e.g. the way Acrobat Reader does) rather than maintain a library. And what I have ended up using was Calibre e-book viewer. It actually is a separate program that comes with Calibre, you can associate relevant file types with it and use it to open them directly without using Calibre itself.
- johnchristopher 8y ago
  I don't understand why epub rendering quality varies so wildly between devices. Isn't it just basic HTML or is there more to it ?
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    Doesn’t the fact that it’s just HTML explain why it varies? All the rendering quality is up to the device.
- skillachie 8y ago
  Give BookFusion a try and let me know if you have the same issues. BookFusion should also render epub content exactly as intended but also works on iOS, Android and Desktops(via Web). BookFusion not only supports epub2/3 but also MOBI, PDF, FB2, TXT and several other formats
qwerty456127 8y ago
Please add support for plain HTML (sounds easy, doesn't it? you probably use something like WebKitGtk as a renderer front-end already), FB2 and MarkDown (both are easy to render into HTML) and DJVU (much better than PDF for scanned books). Then add BeeLine-like text colouring and Spritz-like RSVP and I'm buying (donating).
rawoke083600 8y ago
awesome !! now give it to me on a bigass(10'+) eink display under $200. Nice project though :)
kNawade 8y ago
It's weird though, why would I want to read on laptop? I can use a kindle, phone, ipad!
- bayindirh 8y ago
  Programming books? Comics in CBR, CBZ format? Not everyone has a full set of screens (reader, phone, pad, laptop, desktop).
haspok 8y ago
Maybe I'm old school, but I don't understand the concept of a "library". I have directories on my filesystem(s), files in those directories, and amazingly powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc / Krusader). Why would an ebook reader even try to do the navigation for me? It should display an ebook, and I'll take care of the rest. If it's showing me the file system, it's redundant. If it's showing me the "library" according to its own logic, then it breaks the consistency. And it makes my life so much harder (eg. where do I find all those books when I want to copy them?). I hate Calibre for the exact same reason.
- bayindirh 8y ago
  I can understand you. However, libraries are hard to understand until managing your collection creates a lot of overhead. A good library can find something from a sizeable collection in a second or two. Calibre is perfectly capable in this regard. Also metadata is something really powerful. However, you need a lot of it (in this case books) to reap its benefits. Calibre doesn't obfuscate / embed the book files. They copy under a folder with Author's name. You can pretty easily access the original file pretty quickly. Maybe you can configure Calibre to use your directory structure without modifying it.
  - pmontra 8y ago
    I can't say I have a large collection of ebooks (just checked: 54) but I won't use a file manager to handle it. I use Calibre because it's much easier to convert between formats, edit metadata, edit the ebook, add a cover page. Basically that's it and Calibre has many more features that I don't use (the reader among the others). I'm sure there are separate programs that do all I use Calibre for, but it's much easier in this way. BTW, I don't understand the use case of reading ebooks on a desktop or laptop instead of on a phone or tablet (or eink reader.) Is this really common? I can imagine reading some technical ebook at my computer while working at my desk, but not fiction or anything else.
    - bayindirh 8y ago
      > BTW, I don't understand the use case of reading ebooks on a desktop or laptop instead of on a phone or tablet (or eink reader). Unfortunately, not everyone has all the screens, and not all phone screens are big enough to read novels and such. I'd rather read a book in my bed on my laptop screen and take notes quickly rather than an older phone and try to write on its keyboard. Also, e-ink readers' screen refresh rate prevents taking extensive notes on the books. You can underline just fine, but longer notes are a bit hard. Last but not the least, comic books in CBZ/CBR format really begs for a quality color display, since colored comics is half the fun in the comics. :D
deleted 8y ago
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rayalez 8y ago
Oh my god finally! I can't believe this! I've been looking for an app like this forever! I was so surprised at how hard it is to find a decent ebook reader for Ubuntu. All the desktop or chrome apps I've tried miss crucial obvious functionality, or are so ugly and painful to use they make me want to cry and throw things. Thank you so much for making this project, it looks amazing, can't wait to try it out! Edit: I was unable to install it on ubuntu 18.04 because it requires libgranite5. To fix this I did: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:philip.scott/spice-up-daily sudo apt install libgranite5 Now it works. Feedback: This app doesn't allow me to scroll through pages? I can only switch between them with arrow keys? That's a huge bummer, pretty much a dealbreaker for me. Everything else looks great. Oh, and looks like it completely breaks PDF formatting for me. I love that it adds a dark mode, but it makes them pretty much unreadable. Table of content's broken as well, chapter names replaced with Content #1, Content #2, etc. And some fonts are missing, hard to figure out which, but I can't read some text in the pdf because of this. Please fix these things, I really wish to use this app!
Faelian 8y ago
Trivia here : the original concept was on deviantart in the elementary-art community. https://www.deviantart.com/danrabbit/art/BookWorm-239349207 https://www.deviantart.com/danrabbit/art/BookWorm-239349207 They have a lot of interesting concepts here : https://www.deviantart.com/elementary-art/favourites/ https://www.deviantart.com/elementary-art/favourites/ It make me really happy that the elementary projet finally manage to provide sexy apps for Linux.
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  I like some of their apps, I wish they would publish them for other distros to use. Namely their own editor is kind of nice, if it supported scripting for plugins (I havent used it in a while so no idea if it does) it would probably really take off as one of the nicer GUI editors if it ever gets adopted by other distros. I think my ideal setup would be POP_OS! with some ElementaryOS apps.
deleted 8y ago
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ratsimihah 8y ago
You might want to take a few minutes to fix the website on mobile
darkpuma 8y ago
This looks very nicely done, though without TTS support (please correct me if I'm wrong) I'm afraid this can't replace my current ebook workflow. Other than that though I like what I see.
josteink 8y ago
The first thing this page should mention is why anyone would use this over Calibre. Calibre works for me. Why should I bother changing my setup?
- raffomania 8y ago
  Calibre is a complex beast that has a bad track record regarding security and will keep using python 2 even after its deprecation.
  - josteink 8y ago
    It does what I need (for instance decrypting Amazon purchases), runs locally and will only process trusted input, not to mention it seems to be gradually migrated to Python 3. I’m not overly worried. For an upcoming competitor, security is only a feature if it also does everything else I need it to.
- skillachie 8y ago
  Would you be interested in trying BookFusion? BookFusion has a Calibre plugin that allows you to easily sync your Calibre eBooks to Android, iOS and Web. The benefit is that all your entire eBook collection will now be at the tip of your finger tips and your bookmarks, highlights, reading progress and eBooks would be synced across all devices. You can learn more at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre PS: Founder of BookFusion and would be happy to hear any feedback you might have.
SamuelAdams 8y ago
Looks like a great tool. I use Calibre but that has a few issues. For reference I have more than 10,000 e-books in various formats. The total size of this collection is somewhere around 200-300 GB. It sits on a network share. Calibre insists on copying all my books to a local directory (~/Calibre Library). My laptop has a 128GB SSD, so that will never work. Will Bookworm do this too? I would prefer it just create a local folder for the metadata, then reference the documents on the network share. But if you want to write the metadata to the same directory as the books, that's cool too.
rafaelvasco 8y ago
I just use Calibre for organizing and editing metadata. To read i just use whatever epub or pdf reader. For me , Calibre does everything I need. Every book organized by group, then author. Every book with its book cover. If it doesn't have one Calibre can generate for me etc. And on top of it all, Calibre generates a neat folder structured with everything properly named. When you have hundreds of books it is a must.
AsyncAwait 8y ago
I just want to thank the author for going the native route. It's rather refreshing.
freedomben 8y ago
Very cool, and it's awesome to see people developing for Elementary OS, even tho I'm currently a Fedora user. Really hope this generates some revenue. Would you be willing to report back later about how you did financially? I'm eminently curious about the economic model and whether it could work. A case-study would be awesome :-)
philonoist 8y ago
Which Windows equivalent should I use since it doesn't support Windows? It will help if it is just as much feature rich as Bookworm and just as much easy to use as Bookworm. Calibre, is therefore ruled out.
- skillachie 8y ago
  You can try BookFusion. A cross platform reader for Desktops(via Web) with native apps for Android and iOS devices. You will be able to read your eBooks on Windows but also on your mobile devices while having your eBook collection, bookmarks, comments and highlights synced. You can learn more at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library
  - philonoist 8y ago
    This is great! Nothing else googling has the required features this one has. Thank you and Thank HN for superseding Google!
deanebarker 8y ago
The problem is not the ebook reader. The problem is trying to buy a commercial ebook from anywhere other than Amazon, and having to use someone's stupid DRM scheme. I tried once to not buy a Kindle book, and I just had to end up installing someone's other app just to decrypt the book so I could read it. You can make all the ebook readers you want. Until we find an easier way to make non-Amazon ebooks easier to read, these aren't going to catch on.
- criddell 8y ago
  I think this is an area the government should step in and force interoperability with ebooks and ebook readers. Nobody should ever be locked out of a book they purchased and lets face it - all of the companies selling DRM protected books will go out of business one day.
- dsr_ 8y ago
  I buy from Google, no DRM, plain epub. Big selection. I buy from Kobo, no DRM, plain epub. Big selection. I buy from a bunch of authors' own websites or small publishing platforms (like bookviewcafe.com) because an even higher percentage of the price goes to the author, and nobody ever pays to put DRM on their own book.
  - taude 8y ago
    Is there any good third-party non-google/amazon reading apps for iPhone/iPad that will sync my places where I'm at in my books?
  - fishywang 8y ago
    I'm not sure about Kobo but I think no DRM is not guaranteed on Google. For certain authors (e.g. John Scalzi) their books on Google will have the small part in description says "At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied." (e.g. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=XVwOEeHTU4QC https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=XVwOEeHTU4QC) but my understanding is without that statement the book will be with DRM.
sanderjd 8y ago
I was hoping this was an e-ink device. The Kindle Paperwhite is my favorite electronic device of all time, but I'd love it even more if it didn't prioritize buying books from Amazon. For instance, I haven't yet gotten it working with books from my library. Are there even better e-reader devices out there?
dublo7 8y ago
I just want a reader that can turn my e books into audio books for when I'm driving.
FabHK 8y ago
Oh, pity, I thought that was about hardware. (I keep buying up the good old Amazon Kindle 5 (with the hardware keys) on ebay and other sites - I lose it all the time, and don't want this annoying expensive newfangled stuff with touch screen that frequently switches to some random page).
- criddell 8y ago
  I have a touchscreen Kindle that's a few years old now and I've never had the problem where it switches to a random page. My next Kindle will probably be the Oasis model as it has hardware buttons for page turn. It's an expensive upgrade, but these things tend to last me a long, long time.
  - FabHK 8y ago
    > switches to a random page Yeah, I should have been more precise. I meant "randomly switches to the next or previous page", and of course it's not random either, it's because a fly landed on it (seriously happened to me regularly in some regions), or a drop of sweat fell on it, or the scarf gently brushed over it (different locations, obviously), etc. Also, it's just nice when I can hold it in the middle (not only the edge) without it switching page. The hardware side buttons were perfectly fine, and (as the other poster observed) are now a ridiculously expensive premium feature! Unfortunately, a used Kindle 5 is now sometimes offered more expensively than it used to cost new. > tend to last me a long, long time Yes, they do - lamentably I tend to lose them. That's why I'm stacking up on the old one :-)
- mcjiggerlog 8y ago
  Oh god I couldn't agree more. The new base Kindle costs more than what I paid for my Kindle 4 nearly 10 years ago, and is in my opinion far worse. Hardware keys are now apparently a premium feature and you now need to spend nearly 200 euros more to have them. All I want is an updated version of Kindle 4 with an added backlight (sidelight?). Can anyone recommend any alternative e-readers that have hardware page turners and a backlight that costs at most around 100 dollars?
burtonator 8y ago
I've built out a similar app named Polar: https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ It's focused around incremental reading and suspend and resume of your reading but also supports annotations (highlights, etc). I also designed it for people like the HN crowd so it's insanely hackable. Biggest thing I'm working on now is onboarding to make it easier to use and a web version.
Invictus0 8y ago
Great work! A nitpick: I think you should try and present the file formats in a different way. It looks really poor on large screens. https://postimg.cc/S2dwMr7G https://postimg.cc/S2dwMr7G
joe5150 8y ago
I just started using Elementary yesterday, I will certainly check this out! As an aside (and also as a small request), I miss the Kindle for PC app's ability to easily display a book in a 2-up view. To get two pages to show now, you have to change it into multi-column view and then mess with the page width and the window size until it looks good. I'd love to have another eBook reader on my computer that has a nice two-page view. Kindle Cloud Reader shows a perfect two-page view, but you can only use it for books you've bought from Amazon.
skillachie 8y ago
Hi HN Crew, I would like to introduce you to Bookfusion, a multi-platform reader that allows you to organize and read your eBooks across Desktops(Windows,Linux, iOS) and Desktop via web and on Android and iOS devices with a native app. More details at: https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library Quick Overview Of Features Cloud Library – create your own eBook cloud library to manage all your eBooks in one place without the need to run your own servers. Upload your entire collection. Read on Any Device – Read your eBooks on the devices you have today and the ones you will have tomorrow. Read on Android, IOS and Web (Linux,Windows & OSX) Integrated Mobile & Web Reader – Have a truly seamless experience by using the same app that you use to organize and manage your eBook library to read your books as well Any Format - Read any book regardless of format from PDF, MOBI, EPUB, TXT, DOC and others. Export & View Highlits - A single interface to view all highlights made across all your eBooks. Export your highlights from the web interface via CSV Sync across all devices – Sync your reading progress, bookmarks and highlights across all devices. Pick up where you left off. Organize your eBooks - Easily change the cover, title, author and assign custom tags to organize your eBook collection. Send to Kindle – Quickly send your books to your kindle device via your kindle email with the click of a button. Calibre plugin - Easily sync your Calibre eBook collection Please feel free to reach out if you have any suggestions or feedback to dc@bookfusion.com PS: Founder of BookFusion
- sctb 8y ago
  Please don't use Hacker News solely to promote your stuff. You've done this way too much already and eventually we ban accounts that continue.
wj 8y ago
Looks great. I'd love to be able to install this on my Chromebook using Linux Beta.

524 points by Jerry2 8y ago

carstonpie2 8y ago

This is cool stuff homie, count me in, I'll use it! I am sick of this apple book thing crashing,

carstonpie2 8y ago
So how I install this? I don't see this app in the store,

nkkollaw 8y ago

Very cool, but on XFCE PDFs lose all formatting.

aceperry 8y ago

I totally love bookworm. The best epub reader that I've found for linux. I only wish it was in the ubuntu repos.

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
there does appear to be a ppa: https://babluboy.github.io/bookworm/#install https://babluboy.github.io/bookworm/#install
philonoist 8y ago
Bookworm is available as a PPA for Ubuntu (16.04 upwards) and other Ubuntu based systems. Open Terminal and run the following comands for installation sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bookworm-team/bookworm sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install com.github.babluboy.bookworm In case of issues related to missing libgranite package, add the Elementary PPA as shown below and re-try. The Elementary PPA can be removed after Bookworm is installed. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:elementary-os/stable sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install com.github.babluboy.bookworm
- aceperry 8y ago
  I use the ppa, but doing that opens you up to security concerns. I've tried to build from source, but there are too many dependencies and I couldn't build it due to conflicting libraries.
  - ViViDboarder 8y ago
    If you trust the PPA you added, does it open you up to any other concerns?
    - r3bl 8y ago
      In an ideal case, no. In a not-so-ideal case, one with the push access could theoretically replace any package on your system with a malicious version that you would pick up automatically using apt upgrade. I'd trust PPAs more if they didn't have such broad possibility of misuse. For example, if I add a PPA that only contains package A, I should at least be warned if that PPA tries to install or upgrade package B. apt will only display that package B needs to be installed/upgraded, it won't inform me that it originated from that PPA. I applaud elementary OS for not bundling software-properties-common by default (a package that allows you to run add-apt-repository). If you decide to install it, you should at least be forced to make an effort to open such possibility of misuse.
      - dalai 8y ago
        I think you can use pinning to prevent the second scenario, assuming you don't mind the extra manual configuration.
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    Security is a spectrum not an on off switch. The question is whats the risk profile/benefit. The ppa like many other is hosted on launchpad.net owned by canonical. If Canonical is compromised you are probably boned any way you slice it. If the developer is compromised you are probably boned. This leaves the fact that the devs account on launchpad could be taken over and used as an attack vector which quite frankly seems like the lessor risk. You have already undertaken the greater risk that the dev or whomever inherits/acquires access to their account is or becomes malicious or incompetent especially given that is not now or will it be audited unless it becomes an official part of the Ubuntu repos. This means that if the bookworm software in version 17 starts to come with a crypto miner you will only become aware of this if it hits hacker news and you happen to read the story whereas were it part of the Ubuntu repos Canonical would be apt to publish this warning via official channels. If you have 835 packages you have 835 potential sources of issues but if they are all vetted by canonical then you have 1 source of fixes/warnings. If you add 17 ppas you now have 18 channels and 17 may be less diligent than canonical is. This situation isn't much improved if you have 17 github repos that you periodically pull from unless you have both the skill and the time to audit the result in depth.

javchz 8y ago

I use Calibre as an iTunes for ebooks from humble bundle, but this may look like a nice alternative for environments where Calibre it's too much. Thanks for sharing.

ChristianGeek 8y ago
Calibre is fantastic for converting between eBook formats, but it’s a mediocre reader at best. (ITunes for eBooks is an apt description in this regard!)
- Moru 8y ago
  Calibre is the library, reading in the library can be less optimal than reading at home :-)
- skillachie 8y ago
  Agreed. This is one of the reasons why we created BookFusion. It allows you to easily organize and manage your eBook collection while being able to read all your eBooks regardless of format on Android, iOS and Desktop(via Web) BookFusion also has a Calibre plugin that will allow you to easily sync your entire eBook collection to the cloud. More information at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library PS: Founder of BookFusion. Will appreciate any feedback that you might have.
sdrothrock 8y ago
I was really interested after this comment if only because Calibre really is an iTunes for ebooks: 1. It has updates ALL THE TIME 2. It has a billion features and I only need one (moving books to/from the device) Unfortunately, after looking over the feature list and realizing that it's for Linux, I realized that this is more of a replacement for Books on OS X -- a local ebook reader.
- DKnoll 8y ago
  A good, basic ebook reader for Windows is FBReader. The Windows version hasn't been updated in years (development seems to have shifted mostly to Android) but it still works just fine.

donatj 8y ago

Ooh, nice. I’ve used Calibre for years, it’s fully featured but god help me it is ugly as sin.

doodliego 8y ago
I've created 80+ ebooks using Calibre, but it's too over-featured for casual ebook reading. I've used IceCream for that but I'll give Bookworm a look.
- themodelplumber 8y ago
  That's a lot of ebooks. Do you write for a living?
- starks1de 8y ago
  Mupdf ( https://mupdf.com https://mupdf.com ) also supports ePub. I personally using it with zathura for vi keybindings and theme support ( https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura-pdf-mupdf https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura-pdf-mupdf )
DKnoll 8y ago
What I love about Calibre is I can manage all my books there and open the network library from FBReader on my phone where I do all my reading.
- SECProto 8y ago
  FBReader was my go-to eReader app for a long time, but in the last few years (since they went closed source) they haven't added any useful (-to-me) features, but have added several advertisements (in the form of popups and in the menu). Still looking for an alternative
  - DKnoll 8y ago
    That's a legitimate complaint. I just paid the money to go premium to remove ads. I've been using it to read books since my Nokia 770 and it has everything I need from an ebook reader so I'm reluctant to change. There's a fork of FBReader on F-Droid called simply 'Book Reader' which is being actively developed (last release 2019-02-08.) Might be worth trying out. Git repo is here: https://gitlab.com/axet/android-book-reader https://gitlab.com/axet/android-book-reader

asicsp 8y ago

looks cool! so far I've been using FBreader and Mcomix without fiddling too much into settings going through the features for bookworm, I didn't know I wanted some of those (ex: annotations, metadata/tags mainly to make it easier to search later on, etc)

skillachie 8y ago
Would you mind taking Bookusion for a spin? BookFusion is an eBook platform that allows you to read your eBooks across Android, iOS and Web. Your reading progress, bookmarks, highlights and eBooks are synced across all devices. We currently have partial support for CBR/CBZ. However full support will be added by the end of March. More at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library PS: I am the founder of BookFusion and would appreciate any feedback that you might have

Causality1 8y ago

The last time I read ebooks on an x86 device was before Pocket PCs got color displays. Are there people who really want to do that?

fake-name 8y ago
I read almost exclusively on a x86 device: A Windows Tablet. This is almost entirely because Windows 8 has the best touch-screen browser available on any platform: Internet Explorer Metro Edition (from a UX perspective, the actual browser internals are horrible). I've also written all my own server-side componentry[1]. 1: https://github.com/fake-name/ReadableWebProxy https://github.com/fake-name/ReadableWebProxy
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Speaking of UX, Windows 10 has (IMO) the best touch-screen UX ever invented, and as a bonus, you get an OS that's not a toy. I'm saddened that MS didn't break through into the mobile market (too little released too late; since they didn't have a competitively-sized app store, they should have included more functionality in the OS itself), and I hope they'll keep the touchscreen-friendly mode in Windows for years to come - I'm not touching another Android tablet if I can avoid it.
donatj 8y ago
I read a fair deal on breaks at work, and split between Calibre and read.amazon.com depending on where I bought the ebook.
sohkamyung 8y ago
I do. I'm using a Microsoft Surface Go for reading using multiple apps at the moment: - Freda for ebooks - Latermark for articles stored using Pocket - Libby for ebooks borrowed from my local library - SumatraPDF for PDF documents and CBZ comics The tablet form factor lets me read while in bed and, as long as I occasionally pay attention to my surroundings, while walking.
fermentation 8y ago
I'm not sure how to comfortably read a pdf without my laptop. I'm sure a tablet would be the best choice, but my laptop is fine for it.

efiecho 8y ago

Very nice design and best thing, it's not an Electron app. I will definitely try this reader.

jasano 8y ago
Just out of curiosity, may I ask what your bias is against electron?
- mav3rick 8y ago
  Can't speak for performance but there are definitely security concerns with Electron.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  They perform comparatively slowly and use more resources and battery power. For example hexchat an irc client seems to use about 50-60MB of ram. Slack by contrast out of the box appears to use 1.2GB of memory. There are at present 12 applications open on my machine. If they all used over a GB each something would be starving given that I only have 8. Note please that most machines still have 8GB or less. Do you really not understand why people are biased against electron or are you pretending to for effect?
  - jasano 8y ago
    I just wanted to hear what people had to say to be honest. Given the success of Slack, is it really that bad? Why has no resource "friendly" alternatives taken its place?
    - seirl 8y ago
      Because people used to be able to use whatever IRC client they wanted for Slack, so it wasn't a problem if they were too memory constrained. In a pure embrace, extend, extinguish fashion, Slack closed the gateway that made them popular and now everyone is stuck with their pile of crap app.
    - 8y ago

arhyth 8y ago

i love elementary OS. but gahd Calibre is just ugly and for some (probably noob) reason, can't get it to work on my machine. i'll try this one out.

ekianjo 8y ago
use an Appimage for Calibre.
skillachie 8y ago
You could probably also give BookFusion a try. You will be able to read on iOS, Android and Web(Linux,Windows,OSX). All your eBooks will be synced across all devices, comments, highlights and reading progress. More at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library . We also plan to release a native app later this year for desktops. PS: I am the founder of BookFusion

hoodwink 8y ago

Does it support an easy way of accessing notes and highlights?

wuxb 8y ago

Used this on Archlinux. Pretty nice!

gymshoes 8y ago

For Windows people, Edge also works as a great epub reader.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
drunkenmeister 8y ago
Don't think it can run .MOBI, do you have any alternatives for that?
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
Having EPUB support in the base OS install, effectively, is a game changer, so I am thrilled Edge has this and I do use it occasionally. Though I've generally been of the opinion Edge is still mostly a poor/underfeatured document reader.

theSealedTanker 8y ago

available for windows?

krtkush 8y ago
Doesn't look like. Seems Linux exclusive.
mariusmg 8y ago
For Windows try SumatraPdf. It's small, highly configurable and handles pdf, epub, mobi etc etc.
- cambalache 8y ago
  Seconded, although the configuration can be a pain, and for the love of god I cannot understand why you cannot copy text in the default, nicer epub display format.

HaoZeke 8y ago

Neat! As a long time calibre user I'm always up for new options.

skillachie 8y ago
As a Calibre user you might be interested in BookFusion. We have a Calibre plugin that allows you to easily sync your eBooks acros, iOS, Android and Web More at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre PS: I am the founder of BookFusion

favadi 8y ago

Anyone knows if there is a ebook reader that supports Android/Linux and can sync book/progress between machines?

Splines 8y ago
It's been awhile since I've used it but Moon+ Reader on Android can sync progress to google drive. At the time the syncing wasn't super reliable, but it worked sometimes.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  I have no idea if syncing reading position works because I only use it on one machine but Moon+ is awesome in other respects. It supports Support epub, pdf, mobi, chm, cbr, cbz, umd, fb2, txt, html, rar, zip or OPDS Its nicely customizable, takes up the whole screen when running including status area, has a night mode, can autorotate or pin the orientation. Personally I really like using it plus calibre companion to sync files with my computer.
jaytaylor 8y ago
I use Lithium which the pro version can sync between Android devices. Doesn't do the Linux part as far as I'm aware, though.
risubramanian 8y ago
I use Google Play Books. There's no Linux client, but the browser works fine.
r3bl 8y ago
A stupid workaround I use: I copy-paste some sentence from a book into my note taking app, and search for that same text on my other device. Note-taking is easier to sync than reading positions themselves. Calibre saves the reading position inside the metadata of the book, so you'd need a way to re-download the book every time you open it.
innerspirit 8y ago
https://read.amazon.com/ https://read.amazon.com/ works but it's only for Amazon books

prevedmedved 8y ago

No FB2 support, not very useful.

robin_reala 8y ago
What’s FB2 in this context?
- dartf 8y ago
  fb2(stands for FictionBook) is an XML-based format, mostly popular in Russia[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FictionBook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FictionBook
  - robin_reala 8y ago
    Thanks, I’d not heard of it before. I guess EPUB’s got a while to go to cover all niches.
    - otabdeveloper1 8y ago
      EPUB can't cover this niche. EPUB is basically just HTML in a zipfile, with all the ugly warts that HTML comes with. (Attempts to enforce "pixel-perfect" design, broken accessibility, ugly fonts forced on you, etc.) EPUB is good for publishers, I guess, but a crappy ebook format. FB2 is a different beast, it's an extremely minimal XML dialect that encodes only semantic information and nothing else. (Basically, tags for chapters/sections/headings/verse and that's about it. The extent of the formatting allowed is 'em' and 'b' tags.)
      - darkpuma 8y ago
        You can create your own clean minimalist epubs. None of that cruft is mandated, you can simply choose to not use any of it. Don't want to enforce a font? Don't specify one. Don't want a stylesheet? Don't put one in.
      - robin_reala 8y ago

kevingrahl 8y ago

How does it handle huge (>500.000 files) libraries?

michaelmrose 8y ago
Good question. If you have such a library you could probably easier install the 20MB app and test and report back than others can acquire such an extensive library. I would think calibre on a local note remote filesystem would perform acceptably. The portion that you want readily available on mobile could be easily synced wirelessly via calibre companion. Note that you can select a query for syncing and include the current status on the wireless device in the query. Give me all the books tagged foo AND where ondevice:false
- kevingrahl 8y ago
  Alright so I got around to testing this out (on elementary OS 5.0 Juno). I found it utterly impractical to use for anything more than 1k ebooks. The biggest problem is that on startup bookworm loads all book covers one after another. It takes forever until every cover loaded for huge libraries. At around 2.5k ebooks the interface becomes so laggy that it’s unusable. Scrolling is no longer possible. I gave up testing this with 5k ebooks. Another thing I dislike about this application is the inability to adjust the width of the columns in the list view. There are some books in my library with very long titles. Bookworm seems to use the longest title to set the width of the title column for all books. The memory usage got to above 11% when idling after starting the App with 5k books.
- kevingrahl 8y ago
  I do and I will. But I don’t have direct access to my library the next few days. Calibre can handle libraries much larger than mine as long as you remember to close the tag browser and such (takes waaay more time to start Calibre if tag browser is opened).

eBombzor 8y ago

Looks like a very nice ebook reader. Could probably replace Calibre for 90% of users. It's already on the Arch platform so here are my thoughts on using it for 5 minutes. Rendering is via poppler which is fine most of the time but definitely not as fast as mupdf + zathura when testing a epub textbook. Definitely has some bugs (clicking on links to different parts of the book don't work for me) but it's still in early development so that's expected. Reading regular books is pretty good but there should be a preset to center text with large margins on the sides (like an article) so it's more readable fullscreen. Definitely has potential but will be sticking to zathura for now.

dewey 8y ago

I’m not sure why people compare it to Calibre here. Calibre is an insanely full featured management, editing and metadata filling software for ebooks and not build as a minimal reader. I guess the main use case is to send ebooks to your reader device from Calibre (Like a Kindle) and it’s doing that very well especially if you invest time in setting it up and using the right plugins for your use case. You also don’t use Photoshop for browsing your images, it’s possible but it’s not what it’s made for.

elizabeth_olu 8y ago
www.elizabethblog.com.ng
bayindirh 8y ago
My first reaction was also the same: "That's a nice reader, but I use Calibre, and can read my eBooks from it too". If I didn't have an eReader and didn't manage it with Calibre, I'd build and it use it happily. While Calibre has a full management, editing and authoring suite, it also has a nice internal reader with reading features. It's not like the Photoshop, but rather the ACDSee suite, which comes with a full fledged image browser and viewer.
- qwerty456127 8y ago
  Yet Calibre is full of quirks, seemingly lacks some reasonable features (like importing metadata from book files themselves) and stuck with Python 2. I wish there were alternatives...
  - bayindirh 8y ago
    When I add books to Calibre, it reads and lists all the metadata correctly. I never added metadata to a book manually if the book has it. Strange. I can't comment on the Python2.x dependencies though.
    - ascii_only 8y ago

paulcarroty 8y ago

Great app, love it.

arendtio 8y ago

Bookworm reminds me of Polar-Bookshelf [1]. They do not seem to have exactly the same features and use-cases, but I think it might be worth comparing (only tried Polar so far). [1]: https://getpolarized.io https://getpolarized.io

giancarlostoro 8y ago
I was also wondering about Polarized vs Bookworm.
- aeosynth 8y ago
  Polarized doesn't support epub - https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf/issues/135 https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf/issues/135
  - burtonator 8y ago
    I'm the author of Polar ... You can use Calibre to convert the ePub to PDF and then import. ePub is used a lot more than I would have thought. Initially we might just convert the ePub to PDF.
burtonator 8y ago
I'm the author of Polar if you have any specific questions. Right now I'm working on making Polar easier to use. I think initial users get confused and I'm trying to fix that. Additionally we're working on a web version but I think that's 1-2 weeks away.

julianwachholz 8y ago

I've been trying out a couple ebook readers on linux. What stands out to me that so far only Calibre renders epub book contents exacty the way they were intended. Both Bookworm and FBReader struggle with variable font formatting, especially syntax highlighted code in books from e.g. PragProg. I wonder if there's just an ebook reader with Calibre's rendering library?

qwerty456127 8y ago
Back in the days when my collection of books was very small I was looking for a simple reader that would just open files I click (e.g. the way Acrobat Reader does) rather than maintain a library. And what I have ended up using was Calibre e-book viewer. It actually is a separate program that comes with Calibre, you can associate relevant file types with it and use it to open them directly without using Calibre itself.
johnchristopher 8y ago
I don't understand why epub rendering quality varies so wildly between devices. Isn't it just basic HTML or is there more to it ?
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  Doesn’t the fact that it’s just HTML explain why it varies? All the rendering quality is up to the device.
skillachie 8y ago
Give BookFusion a try and let me know if you have the same issues. BookFusion should also render epub content exactly as intended but also works on iOS, Android and Desktops(via Web). BookFusion not only supports epub2/3 but also MOBI, PDF, FB2, TXT and several other formats

qwerty456127 8y ago

Please add support for plain HTML (sounds easy, doesn't it? you probably use something like WebKitGtk as a renderer front-end already), FB2 and MarkDown (both are easy to render into HTML) and DJVU (much better than PDF for scanned books). Then add BeeLine-like text colouring and Spritz-like RSVP and I'm buying (donating).

rawoke083600 8y ago

awesome !! now give it to me on a bigass(10'+) eink display under $200. Nice project though :)

kNawade 8y ago

It's weird though, why would I want to read on laptop? I can use a kindle, phone, ipad!

bayindirh 8y ago
Programming books? Comics in CBR, CBZ format? Not everyone has a full set of screens (reader, phone, pad, laptop, desktop).

haspok 8y ago

Maybe I'm old school, but I don't understand the concept of a "library". I have directories on my filesystem(s), files in those directories, and amazingly powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc / Krusader). Why would an ebook reader even try to do the navigation for me? It should display an ebook, and I'll take care of the rest. If it's showing me the file system, it's redundant. If it's showing me the "library" according to its own logic, then it breaks the consistency. And it makes my life so much harder (eg. where do I find all those books when I want to copy them?). I hate Calibre for the exact same reason.

bayindirh 8y ago
I can understand you. However, libraries are hard to understand until managing your collection creates a lot of overhead. A good library can find something from a sizeable collection in a second or two. Calibre is perfectly capable in this regard. Also metadata is something really powerful. However, you need a lot of it (in this case books) to reap its benefits. Calibre doesn't obfuscate / embed the book files. They copy under a folder with Author's name. You can pretty easily access the original file pretty quickly. Maybe you can configure Calibre to use your directory structure without modifying it.
- pmontra 8y ago
  I can't say I have a large collection of ebooks (just checked: 54) but I won't use a file manager to handle it. I use Calibre because it's much easier to convert between formats, edit metadata, edit the ebook, add a cover page. Basically that's it and Calibre has many more features that I don't use (the reader among the others). I'm sure there are separate programs that do all I use Calibre for, but it's much easier in this way. BTW, I don't understand the use case of reading ebooks on a desktop or laptop instead of on a phone or tablet (or eink reader.) Is this really common? I can imagine reading some technical ebook at my computer while working at my desk, but not fiction or anything else.
  - bayindirh 8y ago
    > BTW, I don't understand the use case of reading ebooks on a desktop or laptop instead of on a phone or tablet (or eink reader). Unfortunately, not everyone has all the screens, and not all phone screens are big enough to read novels and such. I'd rather read a book in my bed on my laptop screen and take notes quickly rather than an older phone and try to write on its keyboard. Also, e-ink readers' screen refresh rate prevents taking extensive notes on the books. You can underline just fine, but longer notes are a bit hard. Last but not the least, comic books in CBZ/CBR format really begs for a quality color display, since colored comics is half the fun in the comics. :D

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rayalez 8y ago

Oh my god finally! I can't believe this! I've been looking for an app like this forever! I was so surprised at how hard it is to find a decent ebook reader for Ubuntu. All the desktop or chrome apps I've tried miss crucial obvious functionality, or are so ugly and painful to use they make me want to cry and throw things. Thank you so much for making this project, it looks amazing, can't wait to try it out! Edit: I was unable to install it on ubuntu 18.04 because it requires libgranite5. To fix this I did: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:philip.scott/spice-up-daily sudo apt install libgranite5 Now it works. Feedback: This app doesn't allow me to scroll through pages? I can only switch between them with arrow keys? That's a huge bummer, pretty much a dealbreaker for me. Everything else looks great. Oh, and looks like it completely breaks PDF formatting for me. I love that it adds a dark mode, but it makes them pretty much unreadable. Table of content's broken as well, chapter names replaced with Content #1, Content #2, etc. And some fonts are missing, hard to figure out which, but I can't read some text in the pdf because of this. Please fix these things, I really wish to use this app!

Faelian 8y ago

Trivia here : the original concept was on deviantart in the elementary-art community. https://www.deviantart.com/danrabbit/art/BookWorm-239349207 https://www.deviantart.com/danrabbit/art/BookWorm-239349207 They have a lot of interesting concepts here : https://www.deviantart.com/elementary-art/favourites/ https://www.deviantart.com/elementary-art/favourites/ It make me really happy that the elementary projet finally manage to provide sexy apps for Linux.

giancarlostoro 8y ago
I like some of their apps, I wish they would publish them for other distros to use. Namely their own editor is kind of nice, if it supported scripting for plugins (I havent used it in a while so no idea if it does) it would probably really take off as one of the nicer GUI editors if it ever gets adopted by other distros. I think my ideal setup would be POP_OS! with some ElementaryOS apps.

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ratsimihah 8y ago

You might want to take a few minutes to fix the website on mobile

darkpuma 8y ago

This looks very nicely done, though without TTS support (please correct me if I'm wrong) I'm afraid this can't replace my current ebook workflow. Other than that though I like what I see.

josteink 8y ago

The first thing this page should mention is why anyone would use this over Calibre. Calibre works for me. Why should I bother changing my setup?

raffomania 8y ago
Calibre is a complex beast that has a bad track record regarding security and will keep using python 2 even after its deprecation.
- josteink 8y ago
  It does what I need (for instance decrypting Amazon purchases), runs locally and will only process trusted input, not to mention it seems to be gradually migrated to Python 3. I’m not overly worried. For an upcoming competitor, security is only a feature if it also does everything else I need it to.
skillachie 8y ago
Would you be interested in trying BookFusion? BookFusion has a Calibre plugin that allows you to easily sync your Calibre eBooks to Android, iOS and Web. The benefit is that all your entire eBook collection will now be at the tip of your finger tips and your bookmarks, highlights, reading progress and eBooks would be synced across all devices. You can learn more at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre PS: Founder of BookFusion and would be happy to hear any feedback you might have.

SamuelAdams 8y ago

Looks like a great tool. I use Calibre but that has a few issues. For reference I have more than 10,000 e-books in various formats. The total size of this collection is somewhere around 200-300 GB. It sits on a network share. Calibre insists on copying all my books to a local directory (~/Calibre Library). My laptop has a 128GB SSD, so that will never work. Will Bookworm do this too? I would prefer it just create a local folder for the metadata, then reference the documents on the network share. But if you want to write the metadata to the same directory as the books, that's cool too.

rafaelvasco 8y ago

I just use Calibre for organizing and editing metadata. To read i just use whatever epub or pdf reader. For me , Calibre does everything I need. Every book organized by group, then author. Every book with its book cover. If it doesn't have one Calibre can generate for me etc. And on top of it all, Calibre generates a neat folder structured with everything properly named. When you have hundreds of books it is a must.

AsyncAwait 8y ago

I just want to thank the author for going the native route. It's rather refreshing.

freedomben 8y ago

Very cool, and it's awesome to see people developing for Elementary OS, even tho I'm currently a Fedora user. Really hope this generates some revenue. Would you be willing to report back later about how you did financially? I'm eminently curious about the economic model and whether it could work. A case-study would be awesome :-)

philonoist 8y ago

Which Windows equivalent should I use since it doesn't support Windows? It will help if it is just as much feature rich as Bookworm and just as much easy to use as Bookworm. Calibre, is therefore ruled out.

skillachie 8y ago
You can try BookFusion. A cross platform reader for Desktops(via Web) with native apps for Android and iOS devices. You will be able to read your eBooks on Windows but also on your mobile devices while having your eBook collection, bookmarks, comments and highlights synced. You can learn more at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library
- philonoist 8y ago
  This is great! Nothing else googling has the required features this one has. Thank you and Thank HN for superseding Google!

deanebarker 8y ago

The problem is not the ebook reader. The problem is trying to buy a commercial ebook from anywhere other than Amazon, and having to use someone's stupid DRM scheme. I tried once to not buy a Kindle book, and I just had to end up installing someone's other app just to decrypt the book so I could read it. You can make all the ebook readers you want. Until we find an easier way to make non-Amazon ebooks easier to read, these aren't going to catch on.

criddell 8y ago
I think this is an area the government should step in and force interoperability with ebooks and ebook readers. Nobody should ever be locked out of a book they purchased and lets face it - all of the companies selling DRM protected books will go out of business one day.
dsr_ 8y ago
I buy from Google, no DRM, plain epub. Big selection. I buy from Kobo, no DRM, plain epub. Big selection. I buy from a bunch of authors' own websites or small publishing platforms (like bookviewcafe.com) because an even higher percentage of the price goes to the author, and nobody ever pays to put DRM on their own book.
- taude 8y ago
  Is there any good third-party non-google/amazon reading apps for iPhone/iPad that will sync my places where I'm at in my books?
- fishywang 8y ago
  I'm not sure about Kobo but I think no DRM is not guaranteed on Google. For certain authors (e.g. John Scalzi) their books on Google will have the small part in description says "At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied." (e.g. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=XVwOEeHTU4QC https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=XVwOEeHTU4QC) but my understanding is without that statement the book will be with DRM.

sanderjd 8y ago

I was hoping this was an e-ink device. The Kindle Paperwhite is my favorite electronic device of all time, but I'd love it even more if it didn't prioritize buying books from Amazon. For instance, I haven't yet gotten it working with books from my library. Are there even better e-reader devices out there?

dublo7 8y ago

I just want a reader that can turn my e books into audio books for when I'm driving.

FabHK 8y ago

Oh, pity, I thought that was about hardware. (I keep buying up the good old Amazon Kindle 5 (with the hardware keys) on ebay and other sites - I lose it all the time, and don't want this annoying expensive newfangled stuff with touch screen that frequently switches to some random page).

criddell 8y ago
I have a touchscreen Kindle that's a few years old now and I've never had the problem where it switches to a random page. My next Kindle will probably be the Oasis model as it has hardware buttons for page turn. It's an expensive upgrade, but these things tend to last me a long, long time.
- FabHK 8y ago
  > switches to a random page Yeah, I should have been more precise. I meant "randomly switches to the next or previous page", and of course it's not random either, it's because a fly landed on it (seriously happened to me regularly in some regions), or a drop of sweat fell on it, or the scarf gently brushed over it (different locations, obviously), etc. Also, it's just nice when I can hold it in the middle (not only the edge) without it switching page. The hardware side buttons were perfectly fine, and (as the other poster observed) are now a ridiculously expensive premium feature! Unfortunately, a used Kindle 5 is now sometimes offered more expensively than it used to cost new. > tend to last me a long, long time Yes, they do - lamentably I tend to lose them. That's why I'm stacking up on the old one :-)
mcjiggerlog 8y ago
Oh god I couldn't agree more. The new base Kindle costs more than what I paid for my Kindle 4 nearly 10 years ago, and is in my opinion far worse. Hardware keys are now apparently a premium feature and you now need to spend nearly 200 euros more to have them. All I want is an updated version of Kindle 4 with an added backlight (sidelight?). Can anyone recommend any alternative e-readers that have hardware page turners and a backlight that costs at most around 100 dollars?

burtonator 8y ago

I've built out a similar app named Polar: https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ It's focused around incremental reading and suspend and resume of your reading but also supports annotations (highlights, etc). I also designed it for people like the HN crowd so it's insanely hackable. Biggest thing I'm working on now is onboarding to make it easier to use and a web version.

Invictus0 8y ago

Great work! A nitpick: I think you should try and present the file formats in a different way. It looks really poor on large screens. https://postimg.cc/S2dwMr7G https://postimg.cc/S2dwMr7G

joe5150 8y ago

I just started using Elementary yesterday, I will certainly check this out! As an aside (and also as a small request), I miss the Kindle for PC app's ability to easily display a book in a 2-up view. To get two pages to show now, you have to change it into multi-column view and then mess with the page width and the window size until it looks good. I'd love to have another eBook reader on my computer that has a nice two-page view. Kindle Cloud Reader shows a perfect two-page view, but you can only use it for books you've bought from Amazon.

skillachie 8y ago

Hi HN Crew, I would like to introduce you to Bookfusion, a multi-platform reader that allows you to organize and read your eBooks across Desktops(Windows,Linux, iOS) and Desktop via web and on Android and iOS devices with a native app. More details at: https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library Quick Overview Of Features Cloud Library – create your own eBook cloud library to manage all your eBooks in one place without the need to run your own servers. Upload your entire collection. Read on Any Device – Read your eBooks on the devices you have today and the ones you will have tomorrow. Read on Android, IOS and Web (Linux,Windows & OSX) Integrated Mobile & Web Reader – Have a truly seamless experience by using the same app that you use to organize and manage your eBook library to read your books as well Any Format - Read any book regardless of format from PDF, MOBI, EPUB, TXT, DOC and others. Export & View Highlits - A single interface to view all highlights made across all your eBooks. Export your highlights from the web interface via CSV Sync across all devices – Sync your reading progress, bookmarks and highlights across all devices. Pick up where you left off. Organize your eBooks - Easily change the cover, title, author and assign custom tags to organize your eBook collection. Send to Kindle – Quickly send your books to your kindle device via your kindle email with the click of a button. Calibre plugin - Easily sync your Calibre eBook collection Please feel free to reach out if you have any suggestions or feedback to dc@bookfusion.com PS: Founder of BookFusion

sctb 8y ago
Please don't use Hacker News solely to promote your stuff. You've done this way too much already and eventually we ban accounts that continue.

wj 8y ago

Looks great. I'd love to be able to install this on my Chromebook using Linux Beta.