> Add bookmarks and annotations. Reading progress, bookmarks, and annotations are stored in plain JSON files, so you can export or sync them easily with any tool or storage service.

> The data for each book is stored in a JSON file named after the book's identifier.

> How are identifiers generated? For formats or books without unique identifiers, Foliate will generate one with the prefix foliate:, plus the MD5 hash of the file.

Finally, someone recognized the benefit of using file hashes for ID purposes and my PDFs no longer get modified when I annotate them!

Now I just wish music playlists used hashes, too…

(This also means hashing the contents wouldn't work.)

I can open PDFs on every OS I've ever used. Like, just open the file, find a PDF file in some directory and open that PDF file and see a render of the PDF.

I've never found anything that can do the same for ebooks without also trying to manage my "library". Like, if I just want to peek at a random epub file it will add it to my "bookshelf" automatically and makes that a very prominent part of the program.

Can I use this to just open an epub file?

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)).

  set database "null"
  set adjust-open "width"
  set scroll-wrap false
  set font "monospace light 24"
  set statusbar-home-tilde true
  set window-title-home-tilde true
  set window-title-page true
  set guioptions "v"
  map [fullscreen]  scroll full-down
  map [fullscreen]  scroll full-up
  map [normal]  scroll full-down
  map [normal]  scroll full-up

I was also just looking for an epub reader due to this Humble book bundle on game design that mostly only has epub:

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/all-about-gaming-mit-pres...

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

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).

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.

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.

Calibre was the very first thing I tried but it seems like it was going to be a time sink. I can't quantify that precisely maybe because of the design? I didn't seem like I could just get going easily.

Foliate was the next thing I tried and seemed perfect. Easy to start, limited options, good design. It was a lot closer to what I was used to on my mac.

I'm sure Calibre probably does a bunch of things perfectly and I should revisit it, but that's the experience coming from a novice.

I use Calibre to manage my collection, create book covers if I need to for non-boo k documents, web for organising and occasional looking up of things, and eReader for reading.

JFC, that's not how the installation and the first run of Calibre works at all. I'd write "I'am not sure why you think people would think calibre is first a manager library and not a book reader after installing it" but I'd be lying.

Can someone please tell me the diskspace requirement for Foliate?

However, it needs flatpak runtime. If you already have different flatpak apps, this is not an issue, it is going to be shared with them, but if this is going to be your first-and-only flatpak app, you need to add few hundreds MB.

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.

- - -

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)

Steps:

0. Uninstall VLC (I just did this to reset its permissions+config)

1. Install VLC (3.5.4 from fdroid)

2. Open VLC

3. It'll start with a splash screen, click next.

4. Next screen is VLC asking what permissions you want to give it. Pick the leftmost of the 3

5. Finish the setup wizard

6. It prompts for notification permission, which I allowed

7. You should be at a screen titled "Permission not granted", with 2 buttons. Click the right button to pick a file

8. Use the system file dialog to pick a file

9. It plays

“Sioyek is a PDF viewer with a focus on technical books and research papers”

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.

There’s only one kind of book I read on my laptop now- programming books PDFs. To code side by side. That's all. And PDF is better for rendering equations, graphs, code with syntax highlighting, and figures.

I use EPUB for "flat" essays, novels, storybooks, poems, etc. i.e. non-text/non-technical stuff.

And I use my Kindle or my tab always for that.

For the once or twice need of opening EPUBs on my laptop, I just use Okular.

Won't install something via Snap/Flat or compile it for that one-off kinds of use.

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

Not at all.

I buy EPUBs from all kinds of vendors, across multiple languages. I also have many downloaded from Standard Ebooks [0].

All EPUB works fine, and provides great experience- as long as a file does not contain one of the following- custom page illustrations, syntax highlighted code, graphs, charts, maps, math equations, color comicstrip etc.

Just use PDF in tablet or laptop for arxiv papers, math/programming books, etc.

Use Kindle for recreational reading- like novels, poetry, essays, etc. I am a huge fan of reading since basically learning to read. And I love Kindle! Am a user for last ~10 years.

[0]: https://standardebooks.org

I'm really not confortable with projects that treat the Git history as junk, to the point I'd rather avoid that software. I daily use the e-reader Koreader, and sometimes Plato, and their source code and Git history are clear and documented (though I think Koreader's choice of Lua is poorly suited to the task). I could patch Koreader to my taste and send pull requests.

(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.)

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.

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.

Thats the few stuff I used regularly.

Although it’s a website, books and reading histories are saved in the browser’s local storage and it doesn’t track anything.

Here’s the link: https://www.minimalreader.xyz

[1] https://www.get-plume.com

EDIT: Spelling errors.

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.

Thanks for your suggestion, I'll consider it. But what do you mean by ugly flashing? Is it the instant background change that turn you off?

I think for the first issue, with the flashing, it seems to flash to you, but it's just the theme being changed to light, isn't it? Or you are specifically only talking about the way the video container doesn't fit the rest of the page while it's loading?

Regarding the second issue, good catch! I'll fix that. Thanks!

I'll try to see what I can do about it to make the transition easier on the eyes, so thanks for the feedback.

thanks, this is quite useful for my macos.

This is because they are in webp format.

I have support for this format disabled in browser, because I know of no simple native viewer on Linux, so I in effect cannot save such images, because I cannot view them.

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).

the only app that works fine with chromebook is its own gallery viewer, but has no bookmarks no annotations

in android theres only xodo which is paid and proprietary

Is this a feature of the app? Can I bundle an ebook with my own hyphenations and ensure that only those hyphenations will appear when Foliate displays the ebook?

Kindles have incredibly awful hyphenation. It seems to originate from somebody confusing the algorithm for hyphenation -- which is "there's a big list of hyphenation points for every word in existence, and when you want to hyphenate a word, you look it up in the list and choose the best available hyphenation point" -- with the algorithm for compressing the master hyphenation list, which involves representing the list as a priority-ordered set of rules for where a hyphen should appear based on a few surrounding letters.

But the result is that Kindles are constantly trying to hyphenate words based on a compressed list of words that doesn't include the word that needs to be hyphenated, with results like "Q-ingjiao".

This could be easily solved by checking every ebook for words that don't appear in the master list, and bundling a custom list of just those words with every book, falling back to the master list in the common case where a word that needs to be hyphenated isn't present in the custom list. But I guess nobody cares.