[throwaway5939]

I don't normally comment on HN, but this topic is something I've got a strong opinion on.

I use Foliate to read epub's, but I've got one massive peeve with ALL e-readers. I'd really, really like for an option that tells the e-reader not to modify my epub. I don't use annotations, I really don't need the e-reader to bookmark where I've stopped reading.

Just don't write over my epub!

[freewizard]

Hmm, I mostly use Calibre for epub reading, and was not aware of it writes bookmark back to epub itself. Do you mean some e-ink reader updates .epub whenever you add bookmark? That seems an odd implementation.

[throwaway5939]

I'm not sure what gets modified, but I've stopped using the Calibre epub-reader because I found that everytime I've read a book, my rsync backup script found changes in the epub. I once checked in the epub (it's a zipfile after all) and there seems to be an extra file added. Removing that solves the issue. It was a long time ago, I can't remember details.

Now I just copy my epub's to a temporary file before reading.

[Sprocklem]

FWIW, there is a setting to make Calibre's reader to save its bookmarks file outside the epub. I think the setting needed to be set in the reader itself.

[bentley]

If you chmod the epub file to read‐only, does the program lose the ability to annotate or save your place?