What software can I use to view epub documents?

Question

What software can I use to view .epub documents?

Solution 1

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.

Solution 2

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

Solution 3

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 

Solution 4

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.

Solution 5

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

View more solutions

Comments

[BuZZ-dEE]

possible duplicate of: Ebook Reader Software

[Wtower]

ebook.online-convert.com/convert-to-pdf

[Tomasz Kalkosiński]

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.

[Richard Hauer]

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.

[SPRBRN]

Super! Fast and I like the fact that it's just another tab in the browser.

[SPRBRN]

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.

[becko]

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.

[balu]

Unfortunately, it looks like the website is dead.

[balu]

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".

[Ivor O'Connor]

I have now switched to Okular. It took a while to get it working but oh well.

[Steven C. Howell]

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.

[Aakash]

@DmitryAlexandrov, as of March 2017 it seems to be free. Good software.

[Dmitry Alexandrov]

@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.

[Abhishek Divekar]

This is larger than Calibre, around 300 MB total.

[Yan King Yin]

And unbearably slow for this ePub book I'm reading... FBreader is incomparably faster.

[Yan King Yin]

Okular is good for exporting to PDF though.

[Hibou57]

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]

347MB at least, without the plugins for ePub and CHM, it’s too big.

[Hibou57]

It just lacks CHM support.

[Hibou57]

@balu, seems the website is back.

[Hibou57]

… and it lacks text selection too, since it displays pages as images.

[pram]

Readium for Chrome has been discontinued

[Clément]

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."

[dilshad]

some of the epubs file not work with it. I tested today face issue with it

[Dmitriy Vinokurov]

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

[xiota]

This ebook reader is no longer developed.

[Ibraheem Ahmed]

@Clément Looks like you made a type nupdf => mupdf

[Clément]

Yes; I meant mupdf; my comment was pointing out that mupdf pulls in 35MB of dependencies, not 3MB.

[Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com]

Proprietary since 2015 unfortunately: fbreader.org

[Eric]

This one is good on ubuntu.

[Kvothe]

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.

[pLumo]

@Bapi can you answer this question ? :-)

[Jeff]

What Ubuntu flavor is this? Or is it a theme that makes it look sort of like a Mac?