
Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader - Jerry2
https://babluboy.github.io/bookworm/
======
haspok
Maybe I'm old school, but I don't understand the concept of a "library". I
have directories on my filesystem(s), files in those directories, and
amazingly powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc /
Krusader).

Why would an ebook reader even try to do the navigation for me? It should
display an ebook, and I'll take care of the rest.

If it's showing me the file system, it's redundant. If it's showing me the
"library" according to its own logic, then it breaks the consistency. And it
makes my life so much harder (eg. where do I find all those books when I want
to copy them?).

I hate Calibre for the exact same reason.

~~~
PurpleRamen
> I have directories on my filesystem(s), files in those directories

Your library.

> powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc / Krusader).

Not powerful enough. Filemanagers are optimized for hierachical views and
don't integrate well with filetypes. Namely, they usually don't extract data
from files, like metadata, covers or previews. Though, filemanagers have
started to do that to some degree.

But they still lack the "alternate view" on your library. Those Walled Garden-
Apps that work with librarys are more like a relational database, offering
flexible selections and content-optimized views that filemanagers are normally
lacking.

The major difference is really just if you want a static and inflexible
organization, or something dynamic. And usually with heterogeneous datas, the
dynamic approach is better for consuming beacuse it allows you to break
through the hierachy.

> (eg. where do I find all those books when I want to copy them?). > I hate
> Calibre for the exact same reason.

Just select your books and export them. Calibre can export to a device, but
also just a local directory. Calibre in that regard is one of the better
gardens. Very flexible and powerful. Just the UI sucks.

~~~
chme
>> I have directories on my filesystem(s), files in those directories

> Your library.

Yes, its already there and quite organized in directories. Now ebook readers
came along and pressed those hierarchical data flat, with long waiting times,
because it needs to index first.

>> powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc / Krusader).

> Not powerful enough. Filemanagers are optimized for hierachical views and
> don't integrate well with filetypes. Namely, they usually don't extract data
> from files, like metadata, covers or previews. Though, filemanagers have
> started to do that to some degree.

grep and find works quite well for most work loads and are fast, why not
enhance (or fork) them to support ebook formats?

Instead ebook readers came along and reinvented filesystems, because users
cannot be trusted to organize their book collection themselves.

> But they still lack the "alternate view" on your library. Those Walled
> Garden-Apps that work with librarys are more like a relational database,
> offering flexible selections and content-optimized views that filemanagers
> are normally lacking.

And at the same time omit very useful information that normal file managers
show. (File creation/write/access time, size, full file name, etc.)

> The major difference is really just if you want a static and inflexible
> organization, or something dynamic. And usually with heterogeneous datas,
> the dynamic approach is better for consuming beacuse it allows you to break
> through the hierachy.

As I said, with long indexing times. I had ~50000 books on a ebook reader once
and that broke it. Just because there are files stored, that should not slow
down the system or even make it completely unusable.

Instead they should just access the filesystem directly, then those problems
don't even arise.

>> (eg. where do I find all those books when I want to copy them?). > I hate
Calibre for the exact same reason.

> Just select your books and export them. Calibre can export to a device, but
> also just a local directory. Calibre in that regard is one of the better
> gardens. Very flexible and powerful. Just the UI sucks.

Calibre is a pretty big application and they are not an ebook reader
primarily. Their main feature is the library. And they spend many man years of
development to improve that and it does work quite well.

But very few ebook applications and handheld readers have the same resources
to implement a similarly powerful library functionality. Instead they have
half backed solutions that make finding and organizing the library more
difficult then if they would have simply used a standard file manager and
grep/find/...

IMO an application that lets you just open epubs and other ebook formats and
render them correctly just like so many pdf viewer do, without any half assed
library functionality duck taped on to it, is highly sought after.

~~~
naravara
>Instead ebook readers came along and reinvented filesystems, because users
cannot be trusted to organize their book collection themselves.

In the early days of Mac OSX, iTunes actually did a great job of just
organizing your music collection for you. It would sort your music into a
nested hierarchy by artist, album, and track title based on the metadata on
the file, which you could edit with iTunes. When you changed stuff around it
would actually modify where the files were saved in the library folder.

It worked great. It was structured logically in your iTunes library, but
organizing and tagging your iTunes library also wound up structuring your file
system logically automatically. So there was never this sense of a pretty
veneer over a messy clusterfuck underneath. The whole thing is designed to
keep things tidy and organized.

~~~
accatyyc
FWIW iTunes is still great for this.

------
dewey
I’m not sure why people compare it to Calibre here. Calibre is an insanely
full featured management, editing and metadata filling software for ebooks and
not build as a minimal reader. I guess the main use case is to send ebooks to
your reader device from Calibre (Like a Kindle) and it’s doing that very well
especially if you invest time in setting it up and using the right plugins for
your use case.

You also don’t use Photoshop for browsing your images, it’s possible but it’s
not what it’s made for.

~~~
bayindirh
My first reaction was also the same: "That's a nice reader, but I use Calibre,
and can read my eBooks from it too". If I didn't have an eReader and didn't
manage it with Calibre, I'd build and it use it happily.

While Calibre has a full management, editing and authoring suite, it also has
a nice internal reader with reading features.

It's not like the Photoshop, but rather the ACDSee suite, which comes with a
full fledged image browser and viewer.

~~~
qwerty456127
Yet Calibre is full of quirks, seemingly lacks some reasonable features (like
importing metadata from book files themselves) and stuck with Python 2. I wish
there were alternatives...

~~~
bayindirh
When I add books to Calibre, it reads and lists all the metadata correctly. I
never added metadata to a book manually if the book has it. Strange.

I can't comment on the Python2.x dependencies though.

~~~
ascii_only
Calibre author have said that despite python2 eol he will not transition to
python3 and that he is "perfectly capable of maintaining python2 himself"

~~~
rat9988
To be honest, I don't see why would you port it to python 3. Isn't it already
working? Are there any python 2 bug hampering its development?

~~~
PurpleRamen
Python2 will be at end of support next year. That means slowly it will become
harder and harder to make calibre runable on modern systems. 3rd-party librays
will decline and receive no updates. Python2-interpreter will not be
installable out-of-the-box. There will be no security-updates or new features.

Python2 as a platform will slowly die and any application depending on it will
die with it. Though, this won't become a serious problem in the next years,
but more like 5-10+ years.

It's sad, but the reality now.

~~~
qwerty456127
To be honest, I doubt corporations will give Python 2 up easily. Currently
Python 2 codebase in use in production is probably fairly huge and is just
working. Look at how hard it is to convince enterprises to give up Internet
Explorer even though Microsoft itself says they should really end using it.
Someone like Red Hat will probably keep maintaining Python 2 for at least some
years more.

~~~
PurpleRamen
Indeed, but companies have full control over their software and used OS-
Versions. They can virtualize, package or even compile themself, and fix
problems in their own space.

But calibre is desktop-software, it depends on the OS, the GUI-Framework and
whats more... Though, it's actually only a bigger deal for linux, beacuse on
Windows and Mac OS is custom to deliver compiled versions from the Project
itself. Also there is not wayland-situation on windows and Mac OS, which might
break GUI-Libs. But as Calibre has so many different gears it's depending on,
there is a good chance that something will break after a certain point.

> Someone like Red Hat will probably keep maintaining Python 2 for at least
> some years more.

Actually, Red Hat is already dropping python2 for their next enterprise-
version as I read. They will probably still have a somewhat maintainend
version available somehow, but it's obvious that python2 is slowly phasing out
now. And many remaining companies are now starting transition too as EOL is
near.

At this point you can already can predict that python2 will have reached
minimal levels of usage in 5 years.

------
eBombzor
Looks like a very nice ebook reader. Could probably replace Calibre for 90% of
users. It's already on the Arch platform so here are my thoughts on using it
for 5 minutes. Rendering is via poppler which is fine most of the time but
definitely not as fast as mupdf + zathura when testing a epub textbook.
Definitely has some bugs (clicking on links to different parts of the book
don't work for me) but it's still in early development so that's expected.
Reading regular books is pretty good but there should be a preset to center
text with large margins on the sides (like an article) so it's more readable
fullscreen. Definitely has potential but will be sticking to zathura for now.

------
donatj
Ooh, nice. I’ve used Calibre for years, it’s fully featured but god help me it
is ugly as sin.

~~~
doodliego
I've created 80+ ebooks using Calibre, but it's too over-featured for casual
ebook reading. I've used IceCream for that but I'll give Bookworm a look.

~~~
themodelplumber
That's a lot of ebooks. Do you write for a living?

------
deanebarker
The problem is not the ebook reader. The problem is trying to buy a commercial
ebook from anywhere other than Amazon, and having to use someone's stupid DRM
scheme. I tried once to not buy a Kindle book, and I just had to end up
installing someone's other app just to decrypt the book so I could read it.

You can make all the ebook readers you want. Until we find an easier way to
make non-Amazon ebooks easier to read, these aren't going to catch on.

~~~
dsr_
I buy from Google, no DRM, plain epub. Big selection.

I buy from Kobo, no DRM, plain epub. Big selection.

I buy from a bunch of authors' own websites or small publishing platforms
(like bookviewcafe.com) because an even higher percentage of the price goes to
the author, and nobody ever pays to put DRM on their own book.

~~~
fishywang
I'm not sure about Kobo but I think no DRM is not guaranteed on Google. For
certain authors (e.g. John Scalzi) their books on Google will have the small
part in description says "At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold
without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied." (e.g.
[https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=XVwOEeHTU4QC](https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=XVwOEeHTU4QC))
but my understanding is without that statement the book will be with DRM.

~~~
buzzert
Many books on Kobo also have DRM unfortunately.

------
julianwachholz
I've been trying out a couple ebook readers on linux. What stands out to me
that so far only Calibre renders epub book contents exacty the way they were
intended. Both Bookworm and FBReader struggle with variable font formatting,
especially syntax highlighted code in books from e.g. PragProg. I wonder if
there's just an ebook _reader_ with Calibre's rendering library?

~~~
johnchristopher
I don't understand why epub rendering quality varies so wildly between
devices. Isn't it just basic HTML or is there more to it ?

~~~
chrisseaton
Doesn’t the fact that it’s just HTML explain why it varies? All the rendering
quality is up to the device.

------
efiecho
Very nice design and best thing, it's not an Electron app. I will definitely
try this reader.

~~~
jasano
Just out of curiosity, may I ask what your bias is against electron?

~~~
michaelmrose
They perform comparatively slowly and use more resources and battery power.

For example hexchat an irc client seems to use about 50-60MB of ram.

Slack by contrast out of the box appears to use 1.2GB of memory. There are at
present 12 applications open on my machine. If they all used over a GB each
something would be starving given that I only have 8. Note please that most
machines still have 8GB or less.

Do you really not understand why people are biased against electron or are you
pretending to for effect?

~~~
jasano
I just wanted to hear what people had to say to be honest. Given the success
of Slack, is it really that bad? Why has no resource "friendly" alternatives
taken its place?

~~~
seirl
Because people used to be able to use whatever IRC client they wanted for
Slack, so it wasn't a problem if they were too memory constrained. In a pure
embrace, extend, extinguish fashion, Slack closed the gateway that made them
popular and now everyone is stuck with their pile of crap app.

------
rayalez
Oh my god finally! I can't believe this! I've been looking for an app like
this forever! I was so surprised at how hard it is to find a decent ebook
reader for Ubuntu.

All the desktop or chrome apps I've tried miss crucial obvious functionality,
or are so ugly and painful to use they make me want to cry and throw things.

Thank you so much for making this project, it looks amazing, can't wait to try
it out!

Edit:

I was unable to install it on ubuntu 18.04 because it requires libgranite5. To
fix this I did:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:philip.scott/spice-up-daily

sudo apt install libgranite5

Now it works.

Feedback:

This app doesn't allow me to scroll through pages? I can only switch between
them with arrow keys? That's a huge bummer, pretty much a dealbreaker for me.
Everything else looks great.

Oh, and looks like it completely breaks PDF formatting for me. I love that it
adds a dark mode, but it makes them pretty much unreadable. Table of content's
broken as well, chapter names replaced with Content #1, Content #2, etc. And
some fonts are missing, hard to figure out which, but I can't read some text
in the pdf because of this.

Please fix these things, I really wish to use this app!

------
rafaelvasco
I just use Calibre for organizing and editing metadata. To read i just use
whatever epub or pdf reader. For me , Calibre does everything I need. Every
book organized by group, then author. Every book with its book cover. If it
doesn't have one Calibre can generate for me etc. And on top of it all,
Calibre generates a neat folder structured with everything properly named.
When you have hundreds of books it is a must.

------
FabHK
Oh, pity, I thought that was about hardware. (I keep buying up the good old
Amazon Kindle 5 (with the hardware keys) on ebay and other sites - I lose it
all the time, and don't want this annoying expensive newfangled stuff with
touch screen that frequently switches to some random page).

~~~
criddell
I have a touchscreen Kindle that's a few years old now and I've never had the
problem where it switches to a random page.

My next Kindle will probably be the Oasis model as it has hardware buttons for
page turn. It's an expensive upgrade, but these things tend to last me a long,
long time.

~~~
FabHK
> switches to a random page

Yeah, I should have been more precise. I meant "randomly switches to the next
or previous page", and of course it's not random either, it's because a fly
landed on it (seriously happened to me regularly in some regions), or a drop
of sweat fell on it, or the scarf gently brushed over it (different locations,
obviously), etc.

Also, it's just nice when I can hold it in the middle (not only the edge)
without it switching page. The hardware side buttons were perfectly fine, and
(as the other poster observed) are now a ridiculously expensive premium
feature!

Unfortunately, a used Kindle 5 is now sometimes offered more expensively than
it used to cost new.

> tend to last me a long, long time

Yes, they do - lamentably I tend to lose them. That's why I'm stacking up on
the old one :-)

------
philonoist
Which Windows equivalent should I use since it doesn't support Windows?

It will help if it is just as much feature rich as Bookworm and just as much
easy to use as Bookworm.

Calibre, is therefore ruled out.

~~~
skillachie
You can try BookFusion. A cross platform reader for Desktops(via Web) with
native apps for Android and iOS devices.

You will be able to read your eBooks on Windows but also on your mobile
devices while having your eBook collection, bookmarks, comments and highlights
synced.

You can learn more at [https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-
library](https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library)

~~~
philonoist
This is great!

Nothing else googling has the required features this one has.

Thank you and Thank HN for superseding Google!

------
arendtio
Bookworm reminds me of Polar-Bookshelf [1]. They do not seem to have exactly
the same features and use-cases, but I think it might be worth comparing (only
tried Polar so far).

[1]: [https://getpolarized.io](https://getpolarized.io)

~~~
giancarlostoro
I was also wondering about Polarized vs Bookworm.

~~~
aeosynth
Polarized doesn't support epub - [https://github.com/burtonator/polar-
bookshelf/issues/135](https://github.com/burtonator/polar-
bookshelf/issues/135)

~~~
burtonator
I'm the author of Polar ...

You can use Calibre to convert the ePub to PDF and then import.

ePub is used a lot more than I would have thought.

Initially we might just convert the ePub to PDF.

------
Faelian
Trivia here : the original concept was on deviantart in the elementary-art
community.
[https://www.deviantart.com/danrabbit/art/BookWorm-239349207](https://www.deviantart.com/danrabbit/art/BookWorm-239349207)

They have a lot of interesting concepts here :
[https://www.deviantart.com/elementary-
art/favourites/](https://www.deviantart.com/elementary-art/favourites/)

It make me really happy that the elementary projet finally manage to provide
sexy apps for Linux.

~~~
giancarlostoro
I like some of their apps, I wish they would publish them for other distros to
use. Namely their own editor is kind of nice, if it supported scripting for
plugins (I havent used it in a while so no idea if it does) it would probably
really take off as one of the nicer GUI editors if it ever gets adopted by
other distros. I think my ideal setup would be POP_OS! with some ElementaryOS
apps.

------
aceperry
I totally love bookworm. The best epub reader that I've found for linux. I
only wish it was in the ubuntu repos.

~~~
philonoist
Bookworm is available as a PPA for Ubuntu (16.04 upwards) and other Ubuntu
based systems. Open Terminal and run the following comands for installation

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bookworm-team/bookworm

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install com.github.babluboy.bookworm

In case of issues related to missing libgranite package, add the Elementary
PPA as shown below and re-try. The Elementary PPA can be removed after
Bookworm is installed.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:elementary-os/stable

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install com.github.babluboy.bookworm

~~~
aceperry
I use the ppa, but doing that opens you up to security concerns. I've tried to
build from source, but there are too many dependencies and I couldn't build it
due to conflicting libraries.

~~~
michaelmrose
Security is a spectrum not an on off switch.

The question is whats the risk profile/benefit.

The ppa like many other is hosted on launchpad.net owned by canonical.

If Canonical is compromised you are probably boned any way you slice it. If
the developer is compromised you are probably boned. This leaves the fact that
the devs account on launchpad could be taken over and used as an attack vector
which quite frankly seems like the lessor risk.

You have already undertaken the greater risk that the dev or whomever
inherits/acquires access to their account is or becomes malicious or
incompetent especially given that is not now or will it be audited unless it
becomes an official part of the Ubuntu repos.

This means that if the bookworm software in version 17 starts to come with a
crypto miner you will only become aware of this if it hits hacker news and you
happen to read the story whereas were it part of the Ubuntu repos Canonical
would be apt to publish this warning via official channels.

If you have 835 packages you have 835 potential sources of issues but if they
are all vetted by canonical then you have 1 source of fixes/warnings. If you
add 17 ppas you now have 18 channels and 17 may be less diligent than
canonical is. This situation isn't much improved if you have 17 github repos
that you periodically pull from unless you have both the skill and the time to
audit the result in depth.

~~~
debiandev
On PPA you need to trust a random individual instead of trusting an official
distribution. Some distribution requires multiple pair of (skilled) eyes to
vet a package.

~~~
michaelmrose
The point is you do the same when you build the source. In many cases the ppa
is provided by the same person providing the source.

------
gymshoes
For Windows people, Edge also works as a great epub reader.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Having EPUB support in the base OS install, effectively, is a game changer, so
I am thrilled Edge has this and I do use it occasionally. Though I've
generally been of the opinion Edge is still mostly a poor/underfeatured
document reader.

------
burtonator
I've built out a similar app named Polar:

[https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

It's focused around incremental reading and suspend and resume of your reading
but also supports annotations (highlights, etc).

I also designed it for people like the HN crowd so it's insanely hackable.

Biggest thing I'm working on now is onboarding to make it easier to use and a
web version.

------
freedomben
Very cool, and it's awesome to see people developing for Elementary OS, even
tho I'm currently a Fedora user. Really hope this generates some revenue.

Would you be willing to report back later about how you did financially? I'm
eminently curious about the economic model and whether it could work. A case-
study would be awesome :-)

------
favadi
Anyone knows if there is a ebook reader that supports Android/Linux and can
sync book/progress between machines?

~~~
Splines
It's been awhile since I've used it but Moon+ Reader on Android can sync
progress to google drive. At the time the syncing wasn't super reliable, but
it worked sometimes.

~~~
michaelmrose
I have no idea if syncing reading position works because I only use it on one
machine but Moon+ is awesome in other respects.

It supports Support epub, pdf, mobi, chm, cbr, cbz, umd, fb2, txt, html, rar,
zip or OPDS

Its nicely customizable, takes up the whole screen when running including
status area, has a night mode, can autorotate or pin the orientation.

Personally I really like using it plus calibre companion to sync files with my
computer.

------
sanderjd
I was hoping this was an e-ink device. The Kindle Paperwhite is my favorite
electronic device of all time, but I'd love it even more if it didn't
prioritize buying books from Amazon. For instance, I haven't yet gotten it
working with books from my library. Are there even better e-reader devices out
there?

------
hoodwink
Does it support an easy way of accessing notes and highlights?

------
asicsp
looks cool! so far I've been using FBreader and Mcomix without fiddling too
much into settings

going through the features for bookworm, I didn't know I wanted some of those
(ex: annotations, metadata/tags mainly to make it easier to search later on,
etc)

------
SamuelAdams
Looks like a great tool. I use Calibre but that has a few issues. For
reference I have more than 10,000 e-books in various formats. The total size
of this collection is somewhere around 200-300 GB. It sits on a network share.

Calibre insists on copying all my books to a local directory (~/Calibre
Library). My laptop has a 128GB SSD, so that will never work. Will Bookworm do
this too?

I would prefer it just create a local folder for the metadata, then reference
the documents on the network share. But if you want to write the metadata to
the same directory as the books, that's cool too.

------
joe5150
I just started using Elementary yesterday, I will certainly check this out!

As an aside (and also as a small request), I miss the Kindle for PC app's
ability to easily display a book in a 2-up view. To get two pages to show now,
you have to change it into multi-column view and then mess with the page width
and the window size until it looks good. I'd love to have another eBook reader
on my computer that has a nice two-page view. Kindle Cloud Reader shows a
perfect two-page view, but you can only use it for books you've bought from
Amazon.

------
javchz
I use Calibre as an iTunes for ebooks from humble bundle, but this may look
like a nice alternative for environments where Calibre it's too much.

Thanks for sharing.

~~~
ChristianGeek
Calibre is fantastic for converting between eBook formats, but it’s a mediocre
reader at best. (ITunes for eBooks is an apt description in this regard!)

~~~
skillachie
Agreed. This is one of the reasons why we created BookFusion. It allows you to
easily organize and manage your eBook collection while being able to read all
your eBooks regardless of format on Android, iOS and Desktop(via Web)

BookFusion also has a Calibre plugin that will allow you to easily sync your
entire eBook collection to the cloud.

More information at [https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-
library](https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library)

PS: Founder of BookFusion. Will appreciate any feedback that you might have.

------
kevingrahl
How does it handle huge (>500.000 files) libraries?

~~~
michaelmrose
Good question. If you have such a library you could probably easier install
the 20MB app and test and report back than others can acquire such an
extensive library.

I would think calibre on a local note remote filesystem would perform
acceptably.

The portion that you want readily available on mobile could be easily synced
wirelessly via calibre companion. Note that you can select a query for syncing
and include the current status on the wireless device in the query.

Give me all the books tagged foo AND where ondevice:false

~~~
kevingrahl
Alright so I got around to testing this out (on elementary OS 5.0 Juno). I
found it utterly impractical to use for anything more than 1k ebooks.

The biggest problem is that on startup bookworm loads all book covers one
after another. It takes forever until every cover loaded for huge libraries.
At around 2.5k ebooks the interface becomes so laggy that it’s unusable.
Scrolling is no longer possible. I gave up testing this with 5k ebooks.

Another thing I dislike about this application is the inability to adjust the
width of the columns in the list view. There are some books in my library with
very long titles. Bookworm seems to use the longest title to set the width of
the title column for all books.

The memory usage got to above 11% when idling after starting the App with 5k
books.

------
Causality1
The last time I read ebooks on an x86 device was before Pocket PCs got color
displays. Are there people who really want to do that?

~~~
fake-name
I read almost exclusively on a x86 device: A Windows Tablet.

This is almost entirely because Windows 8 has the best touch-screen browser
available on any platform: Internet Explorer Metro Edition (from a UX
perspective, the actual browser internals are horrible). I've also written all
my own server-side componentry[1].

1: [https://github.com/fake-name/ReadableWebProxy](https://github.com/fake-
name/ReadableWebProxy)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Speaking of UX, Windows 10 has (IMO) the best touch-screen UX ever invented,
and as a bonus, you get an OS that's not a toy. I'm saddened that MS didn't
break through into the mobile market (too little released too late; since they
didn't have a competitively-sized app store, they should have included more
functionality in the OS itself), and I hope they'll keep the touchscreen-
friendly mode in Windows for years to come - I'm not touching another Android
tablet if I can avoid it.

------
skillachie
Hi HN Crew,

I would like to introduce you to Bookfusion, a multi-platform reader that
allows you to organize and read your eBooks across Desktops(Windows,Linux,
iOS) and Desktop via web and on Android and iOS devices with a native app.

More details at: [https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-
library](https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library)

Quick Overview Of Features

Cloud Library – create your own eBook cloud library to manage all your eBooks
in one place without the need to run your own servers. Upload your entire
collection.

Read on Any Device – Read your eBooks on the devices you have today and the
ones you will have tomorrow. Read on Android, IOS and Web (Linux,Windows &
OSX)

Integrated Mobile & Web Reader – Have a truly seamless experience by using the
same app that you use to organize and manage your eBook library to read your
books as well

Any Format - Read any book regardless of format from PDF, MOBI, EPUB, TXT, DOC
and others.

Export & View Highlits - A single interface to view all highlights made across
all your eBooks. Export your highlights from the web interface via CSV Sync
across all devices – Sync your reading progress, bookmarks and highlights
across all devices. Pick up where you left off.

Organize your eBooks - Easily change the cover, title, author and assign
custom tags to organize your eBook collection.

Send to Kindle – Quickly send your books to your kindle device via your kindle
email with the click of a button.

Calibre plugin - Easily sync your Calibre eBook collection

Please feel free to reach out if you have any suggestions or feedback to
dc@bookfusion.com

PS: Founder of BookFusion

~~~
sctb
Please don't use Hacker News solely to promote your stuff. You've done this
way too much already and eventually we ban accounts that continue.

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wuxb
Used this on Archlinux. Pretty nice!

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dublo7
I just want a reader that can turn my e books into audio books for when I'm
driving.

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Invictus0
Great work! A nitpick: I think you should try and present the file formats in
a different way. It looks really poor on large screens.

[https://postimg.cc/S2dwMr7G](https://postimg.cc/S2dwMr7G)

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darkpuma
This looks very nicely done, though without TTS support (please correct me if
I'm wrong) I'm afraid this can't replace my current ebook workflow. Other than
that though I like what I see.

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arhyth
i love elementary OS. but gahd Calibre is just ugly and for some (probably
noob) reason, can't get it to work on my machine. i'll try this one out.

~~~
skillachie
You could probably also give BookFusion a try. You will be able to read on
iOS, Android and Web(Linux,Windows,OSX). All your eBooks will be synced across
all devices, comments, highlights and reading progress.

More at [https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-
library](https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library) . We also plan to
release a native app later this year for desktops.

PS: I am the founder of BookFusion

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josteink
The first thing this page should mention is why anyone would use this over
Calibre.

Calibre works for me. Why should I bother changing my setup?

~~~
raffomania
Calibre is a complex beast that has a bad track record regarding security and
will keep using python 2 even after its deprecation.

~~~
josteink
It does what I need (for instance decrypting Amazon purchases), runs locally
and will only process trusted input, not to mention it seems to be gradually
migrated to Python 3. I’m not overly worried.

For an upcoming competitor, security is only a feature if it also does
everything else I need it to.

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carstonpie2
This is cool stuff homie, count me in, I'll use it! I am sick of this apple
book thing crashing,

~~~
carstonpie2
So how I install this? I don't see this app in the store,

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rawoke083600
awesome !! now give it to me on a bigass(10'+) eink display under $200. Nice
project though :)

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kNawade
It's weird though, why would I want to read on laptop? I can use a kindle,
phone, ipad!

~~~
bayindirh
Programming books? Comics in CBR, CBZ format? Not everyone has a full set of
screens (reader, phone, pad, laptop, desktop).

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qwerty456127
Please add support for plain HTML (sounds easy, doesn't it? you probably use
something like WebKitGtk as a renderer front-end already), FB2 and MarkDown
(both are easy to render into HTML) and DJVU (much better than PDF for scanned
books). Then add BeeLine-like text colouring and Spritz-like RSVP and I'm
buying (donating).

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wj
Looks great. I'd love to be able to install this on my Chromebook using Linux
Beta.

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HaoZeke
Neat! As a long time calibre user I'm always up for new options.

~~~
skillachie
As a Calibre user you might be interested in BookFusion. We have a Calibre
plugin that allows you to easily sync your eBooks acros, iOS, Android and Web

More at
[https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre](https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre)

PS: I am the founder of BookFusion

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nkkollaw
Very cool, but on XFCE PDFs lose all formatting.

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AsyncAwait
I just want to thank the author for going the native route. It's rather
refreshing.

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paulcarroty
Great app, love it.

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theSealedTanker
available for windows?

~~~
mariusmg
For Windows try SumatraPdf. It's small, highly configurable and handles pdf,
epub, mobi etc etc.

~~~
cambalache
Seconded, although the configuration can be a pain, and for the love of god I
cannot understand why you cannot copy text in the default, nicer epub display
format.

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prevedmedved
No FB2 support, not very useful.

~~~
robin_reala
What’s FB2 in this context?

~~~
dartf
fb2(stands for FictionBook) is an XML-based format, mostly popular in
Russia[0]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FictionBook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FictionBook)

~~~
robin_reala
Thanks, I’d not heard of it before. I guess EPUB’s got a while to go to cover
all niches.

~~~
otabdeveloper1
EPUB can't cover this niche.

EPUB is basically just HTML in a zipfile, with all the ugly warts that HTML
comes with. (Attempts to enforce "pixel-perfect" design, broken accessibility,
ugly fonts forced on you, etc.)

EPUB is good for publishers, I guess, but a crappy ebook format.

FB2 is a different beast, it's an _extremely_ minimal XML dialect that encodes
only semantic information and nothing else. (Basically, tags for
chapters/sections/headings/verse and that's about it. The extent of the
formatting allowed is 'em' and 'b' tags.)

~~~
darkpuma
You can create your own clean minimalist epubs. None of that cruft is
mandated, you can simply choose to not use any of it. Don't want to enforce a
font? Don't specify one. Don't want a stylesheet? Don't put one in.

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ratsimihah
You might want to take a few minutes to fix the website on mobile

