[qwerty456127]

The UI is not the only weird part of it, probably the least weird one.

What I miss are first-class attachments (i.e. code archives and CD/floppy images) support, raw file naming (without automatic romanization of non-ASCII alphabets), flat storage (without creating a separate folder for every book). Using a Calibre-managed library from outside of Calibre (i.e. on a PocketBook reader) feels quite unnatural.

Another thing I always wanted is a simple viewer app without library management features. Like Adobe Acrobat Reader but for ePub and other book formats. The Linux app closest to this concept also comes with Calibre (Sumatra does the job on Windows). All the other book viewers I've seen insist on maintaining your library.

[secstate]

If you're on linux, check out Foliate. It's everything you're asking for :D

[tym0]

Any recommendation for a similar tool for Windows? The integrated Calibre reader is... Special...

[birksherty]

Sumatra can open many formats including epub, but some epubs may not look as good, also check Adobe Digital Edition.

[qwerty456127]

Not really. As soon as I've launched Foliate the second time it shown me the list with the previous book I've read. I don't want a viewer to maintain any state (besides the settings) between uses.

[horstmeyer]

Okular can open ebooks. Maybe it does what you want.

[Jedd]

Okular's my favourite PDF reader -- I install it even on Microsoft Windows machines I have to use -- but it doesn't read .epub or .mobi files unfortunately.

[horstmeyer]

I'm pretty sure it does for me. I think it's probably a package that it uses. I'll check tomorrow and let you know.

[Jedd]

Hot dang you're absolutely right - I'd never discovered this package before:

okular-extra-backends

Includes support for mobi and epub, as well as TIFF, CHM, Markdown etc. Weirdly the .epub and .mobi are quite slow to open compared to PDF, but I'm happier now for the suggestion to go hunting for this - thank you!

[qwerty456127]

> okular-extra-backends

> Includes support for mobi and epub

Curious. I didn't know that was there.

> as well as TIFF,

The last time I've tried it didn't seem to support multi-page TIFFs

> CHM

Very curious. Never seen a good alternative CHM viewer (although seen apps advertised as such numerous times).

[Jedd]

Yeah, it's well hidden - I'm sure I've looked for okular support for mobi & epub a while back, mostly because 'ebook-reader' that comes with calibre is a bit pants.

Must have been quite a while back, I guess.

On Debian unstable I'm seeing okular-extra-backends (as mentioned) along with packages for ODP and ODT, as well as an okular-mobile package (postscript, dejavu, DVI, comic books, fictionbook, Plucker, etc.

I've just tried this with an Asterix comic in .cbr format - no joy.

Works a treat with a Deadpool .cbz file though.

For CHM, and I've not [ found / been forced to acquire for want of a better format ] any of those since 2008, kchmviewer is pretty fine (I'm a KDE user so it fits nicely, though like most KDE apps it only wants some KDE / QT libraries to run on your preferred DE).

[schwartzworld]

What's the benefit over just converting to html and using a browser? As far as I know epub is just html anyway.

[throwanem]

Mostly; the structural information is in a mix of XHTML and various XML schemas. Conceptually it's more like that weird "HTML archive" format that IE used to do back when, but considerably more complex, and much less terrible thanks to being a W3C standard and not MIME-encoded.

The .epub file itself is just a zip archive. You can open it that way and pull the HTML content out, if you want, although it may be a pain to work with absent some kind of conversion - I think Calibre can linearize an epub into a single HTML file, but I haven't actually needed to do that so can't say for sure.

[alanbernstein]

This is off topic, but I found a recent comment from you just so I could thank you for recommending Free Radical a little while ago. I never even played the game, but the book is excellent on its own.

[qwerty456127]

That's among the reasons why I actually dislike ePub and prefer to convert (which involves pandoc/calibre + some hand-written scripting and hand-editing) epub to FB2 (which I love, it only has some minor imperfections). FB2 is a well-structured straightforward single-file XML designed with data-presentation separation in mind.

[throwanem]

I can see the appeal, but that's not an option for me right now, since EPUB is on the input side of the project that's had me studying the relevant standards in the last few days.

That said, it's not the worst standard, if a little bit overcomplicated by trying to be all things to all people with a bunch of features I suspect are almost never actually used in the wild. Having the content already formatted as XHTML is really convenient for what I'm doing with it, too.