Gnome ePub reader?

English Applications
1

Are there any Gnome ePub readers out there? I’ve found an old thread that recommends Occular and some external apps (mainly ones that are “bookshelf” apps, which is more than I want, with odd UIs) but nothing for Gnome.

I’ve got Okular installed if I have to use it, because of the odd packaging of Mono-Qt, but it takes a while to get started and looks really ugly in Gnome. If there’s a Gnome alternative then it would be a great help.

In case anyone is wondering then the reason I’m asking is because Games Workshop are starting to go digital. At £6.50 per eBook then I’m not going to buy them (that’s about 50p less than most titles in paper back! Or £1.50 for some) but they’re currently giving away a free eBook on “eBook Friday” to try to promote it. I’m in it for the freebies :wink:

Thanks.

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On Sun, 17 Oct 2010 20:36:03 +0000, IBBoard wrote:

> Are there any Gnome ePub readers out there? I’ve found an ‘old thread’
> (http://tinyurl.com/2376vm2) that recommends Occular and some external
> apps (mainly ones that are “bookshelf” apps, which is more than I want,
> with odd UIs) but nothing for Gnome.

It’s not really a GNOME/gtk app, but I like Calibre.

Jim

Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C

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i don’t like calibre’s interface, but it’s good to convert MS .lib books to epub and other formats. for online reading i prefer FBReader, from the education repo (Index of /repositories/Education/openSUSE_11.3). it also got basic ‘bookshelf’ capability, but that shows only when accessing it’s ‘library.’ starting the app. it shows the latest book you were reading, at the place you stopped reading, in an uncluttered interface.

–
phani.

4

Calibre is the one mentioned in the other thread. I gave it a quick try as I was posting and it does use GTK widgets, but it also has a terrible interface (huge ugly icons and not just opening up books from a double-click etc) and appears “bookshelf” oriented. FBReader was the other one that I’d read about, but I hadn’t put it high on my list because of the uninspiring screenshots. Maybe I’ll give it a look.

Maybe Gnome people just don’t think of eBooks. Something to plug in to Evince would be ideal and make it similar to Okular, but maybe Evince is too PDF/PS-centric.

Thanks.

5

there’s an updated calibre in develop/tools/documentation repo (Index of /repositories/devel:/tools:/documentation/openSUSE_11.3) that looks a bit better than the older version from std. repos. in my case i needed to add dev-lang-python repo (Index of /repositories/devel:/languages:/python/openSUSE_11.3) to get a dependency though.

re. FBReader, it looks “uninspiring,” but for me that means unobtrusive. i just see the book i’m reading, not much else around, which i like.

–
phani.

6

Thanks. I’ve just tried them both out and neither seems great.

Calibre has the annoying habit of using its “bookshelf”, even if you “open with”. You can click the index number on the left to open the book rather than using the context menu (which isn’t intuitive) but it gets a bit jump-happy at the end of a chapter (you scroll to the bottom of a chapter and it has one line of space - scroll a touch too far and you’re suddenly dropped at the top of the next chapter and have to scroll back).

FBReader is okay, but it doesn’t handle the paging very well (you don’t get a “page edge”, so it looks like a continuous stream, like HTML, but then it jumps to the next page). At least it lets you scroll the last line most of the way up the page before it jumps. It might not have the prettiest icons, but at least it seems to mainly keep out of my way and uses the desktop look and feel.

Thanks.