Reading ebooks

2016-04-11 — 2025-03-02

academe

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workflow

Wherein desktop handling of e‑books is presented, options are catalogued, Calibre’s ISBN‑oriented management is noted, and Thorium’s EPUB‑3 support and accessibility for LCP‑protected files are described.

Handling desktop ebooks is annoying and very spammy to search for. Ergo, some options for doing it on the desktop.

Related: tablet ereaders.

1 Calibre

Calibre isn’t a general metadata sync solution, but it does manage e-books well, especially ones that are real books and have ISBNs etc. And it does synchronize with various e-book readers and convert to their local dialect of whatever. (open source, although it is a giant bag of chaos and I defy anyone else to participate other than the creator.)

2 Thorium / Readium

Thorium Reader looks pretty good and seems to be developed by an open source consortium of library-inclined types.

For a long time, there was no modern EPUB 3 compliant reading application usable on Windows, OSX and Linux, properly accessible for print disabled people, with a good support for the LCP DRM and capable of browsing OPDS catalogs.

EDRLab decided to build such an application and release it for free, in order to provide users a great way to enjoy on a large screen EPUB publications, comics / manga / bandes dessinées, audiobooks, LCP protected PDF documents.

Print disabled people now benefit from an EPUB 3 reading app which supports screen readers like Jaws and NVDA on Windows, Voice Over on Mac.

It is the flagship product of a complicated open source umbrella supporting the Readium project which I do not need to unsnarl here but important words here are

EDRLab, the major developer
Readium Architecture — in particular the Javascript-based Redadium 2 architecture ther is a Redium 1 which seems to be a different thing. See also GitHub - readium/architecture
here is Readium 1 whcih is not easy to find from the EDR site
readium/awesome-readium documents some other packages using their infrastructure.

3 Zotero

Zotero totally reads epub books since at least version 7.

4 Ubooquity

Ubooquity has been recommended to me also, have not tried it. Free for non-commercial use.

5 DJVu in particular

I’m not quite sure which app to use for macOS DJVU reading. Some candidates:

DjVuLibre: Open Source DjVu library and viewer. Unclear if maintained. Maybe? The last file updates seem to be 2020 and seems not to be signed. However, it is offered as a package in homebrew as djview4.
MacDjView, seems to have been updated in 2023, but not cryptographically signed.
Cisdem Document Reader for Mac (USD20)
DJVu Reader Pro (USD4)