Foliate: Read e-books in style, navigate with ease

Calibre works exactly the way you suggest, so I'm not sure why you haven't found it.

It comes with an app called ebook-viewer that doesn't do anything except view ebooks. It doesn't automatically add it to the calibre library management.

I can open PDFs on every OS I've ever used.

I can't do that, on windows, or linux. I loved the experience that evince on ubuntu gave me for comics/manga some years ago (what I want: continuous pages, no menu or scrollbar visible, centered, fixed width, variable width, scrollbar on edge hover to show progress), and nothing that I've tried comes remotely close.

I was able to come close with HTML + CSS so I am partially content.

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A recent big failure of mine is to find a music player on F-Droid, to listen to albums, that

  - is capable to play a song, 
  - is capable to seek in the song
  - doesn't need access to every media file ever on my phone, only the actual file (either by popping up the file chooser, or the file is opened from an another program)

Zathura and okular can do it, as well as Sumatra on windows, but they suffer from ugly defaults. The best reader is koreader (kobo device in my case) as it let you customize the reading experience.

I tried creating a reader (macos) based on mupdf (koreader also used it) and it’s definitely possible to have an epub viewer. I also dislike bookshelf type software if they try to manage the files as well (a simple database can be fine). So far. I just use these to check the epub file and do the reading on the kobo instead (or convert to pdf if I want annotations (ipad)).

Check out sioyek, it’s great and can open epubs like normal pdfs:

https://sioyek.info/ https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek

I like foliate, certainly one of the slicker options out there, but yes it does have the behaviour you describe.

I do have need of a library, but there's not much point for me if it's just one or two types of document. I've just moved to the new Zotero 7 beta, which has epub support, has always managed PDFs and web snapshots, and since Zotero 6 has supported rich annotation.

Perfect setup for me. One library containing all my notes, citations and reading.

Ironically, the best ebook reader that just worked like you said was Microsoft Edge when it had its own engine, before it became "Chrome but even worse".

Foliate's core function is an ebook reader and not library management. Once installed you can double click your epubs to open them on foliate - it will not move around your stuff.

There is a library view in the app but it is mostly a history of recently accessed files.

koreader is very polite about this, unlike calibre.

FBReader does this on MacOS

On Linux, I prefer to use MuPDF for just opening any epub file.

That was originally a PDF reader, but it has been working for some time also with epub files.

It renders the pages not only very fast, but also better than any other epub reader that I have tried (all the others seem to make worse choices about the relative sizes of various page elements).

Calibre has a 'standalone' ebook viewer component.

I'm actually working on something like this:

https://github.com/project-kiosk/kiosk/tree/v3

I'm still deep in the trenches, though. That project is like my personal zen garden of deadline-free software development, so don't expect a release soon. Happy if someone would be interested in contributing, though :)

Maybe I'm not understanding, but wouldn't using the file hash to keep track of things make it really tricky if the file is modified in any way? E.g. when annotating a PDF it would lose all previous data associated because the hash would change

I bought a Kindle for this (programming books and PDFs) but was quickly disappointed

The device itself is pleasant enough

But I should have guessed, the experience for managing any content bought/downloaded from outside Amazon is almost unusable

A Kindle is a physical device and a tab is a tablet (I initially thought it was browser tab)? My family sat/stepped on two Kindles (crushing the screens to oblivion) growing up and nobody has dared buy another one since; I don't know if it's time to reconsider.

Align well with the strengths and limitations of various devices and file formats

Would you mind listing some of the killer Calibre features you'd expect to see in an MVP?

I would love this too. Calibre is amazingly useful and powerful, there’s nothing else like it, but my goodness the UI is ugly.

I’ve come to appreciate it as some sort of outsider art anti-design, defiantly refusing to follow any notion of design consistency and aesthetics. But still, a nicely designed version would be amazing.

How do you feel about the built-in Apple Books?

It might be the most awesome software in the world, but if I can't read the majority of bug reports, it's not something I can feel comfortable using.

(This is not a flaw in the software, this is a flaw in me: I don't know how to read -- I'm assuming it's Mandarin Chinese, but I can't even reliably tell that.)

I have tried nearly all the epub readers mentioned.

Koodo is now what I use, it renders the best for me, I feel like I'm reading a paper book, which is great to me, the fonts and theme are great.

Calibre's epub reader is painfully slow to start, and it does not look that good either.

I wish other epub readers can have better fonts and color.

Mupdf.

I quite liked ReadEra. Scans your phone for all epubs, allows grouping and organizing them, but most importantly, has a good looking, customizable reading interface.

KOreader is quite nice after some setup.

Moon+ reader for non technical books

I use Librera FD from f-droid[0], I think it works great though I don't typically read books on my phone (instead opting to use an e-ink kindle).

[0] https://f-droid.org/packages/com.foobnix.pro.pdf.reader/

Beautiful app, how did you deal with Qt licensing if I may ask?

One nit regarding website, toggling dark mode causes a video change that has some ugly flashing, I think you could improve this by recording the video without dropshadow and adding the shadow with CSS.

Hey, might I suggest adding a public domain example book? I tried adding a couple of different epubs that I happen to have on my phone, but it just says "Please select an EPUB file." when I do. (Using mobile Firefox.)

any plans to add pdf support?

There's Alexandria(https://github.com/btpf/Alexandria), which was inspired by Foliate and supports Windows and MacOS.

Did you try wsl?

Voice Dream Reader. Using it for 10+ years. Haven’t found anything that comes close.

The built in Books meets all those criteria.

Firefox works fine as a native viewer of the saved webp images on Linux, if you associate the file extension/file type with it. Also Chromium/Chrome can be used for the same purpose.

The only disadvantage is that the browsers are slower and they have much more inconvenient user interfaces than the dedicated image viewers, for functions like zoom and pan or passing to the next or previous image in a directory.

An alternative is to use the movie player "mpv" as the native webp viewer. This is much faster and it has the advantage of easy navigation in a directory with webp images and of easy zoom and pan (you may need to edit the mpv configuration and bind the ZOOMIN and ZOOMOUT commands to whatever keys you prefer).

ffplay?

Have you tried KOreader? https://koreader.rocks

Thanks for the write up!

I just wanted to chime in to say the Foliate code is really beautifully written too.

I was able to hack together an epub audiobook reader by running a custom version of foliatejs in Microsoft Edge (which has an amazing and free text to speech engine called "read aloud"). It's VERT hacky but you can try it here: https://nathansherburn.github.io/foliate-js/

Works on mobile and desktop Edge.