Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by lulouie | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

lulouie

I'm using Linux and trying to find a e-reader recently. Here is what I tested on Arch:

Calibre: Failed to open

Okular: Ugly, cannot modify margin

bookworm: No two-page view, only scrolling-mode, and scrolling-mode cannot get the reading progress

zathura: too simplify resulting in not know how to use

lector: cannot recognize epub......

Buka: cannot open the book. (I don't get the logic flow, create a list first, then import the book, then crash)

Until I found Foliate, it support two-page view w/ progress bar, it support epub will in different language (I test en_US and zh_TW), fast lookup (gtrans, Wiktionary, Wikipedia), good UI, ...etc

View on HN

> Calibre: Failed to open

Perhaps this says more about Arch than it does Calibre.

dont you dare!

yep, is because Arch (basically because qt5 upgrade...), and with the issue on it: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/63051

$ calibre

Fatal Python error: PyQt5.QtCore: Unable to embed qt.conf

[1] 13321 abort (core dumped) calibre

At that moment, I didn't have time to workaround on it :(

Ah, too bad. It's the crappiest of the bunch UX-wise, but nothing comes close to it feature-wise.

I don't use it to read (I have an e-reader for that purpose), but I'd be lost without Calibre for ebook management.

I really wish there was a practical alternative to Calibre for general ebook organization purposes. It's extra-painful that Books.app on Mac could almost fit that role, except that it doesn't let you edit enough metadata for your own imported files to properly manage series/publisher stuff.

I recently used Calibre to convert a pdf to epub. I agree the UX is lacking, but it works.

Ah, the joys and pain of a rolling release :)

Sorry for the snarkiness in my previous comment, if you get the chance perhaps you can look into helping with this issue. Contributing to the distributions I use has taught me a lot about the tools I use every day.

This has been fixed last week. Try update your system.

Regarding Zathura the most readily available resource can be found by running man zathura and man zathurarc. The same info is of course on the web.

It does 2 page view, optionally shows progress, and with the mupdf backend supports epub and pdf and a few more.

Now it doesn't support mobi but calibre can automatically create an epub from the mobi on import.

Calibre is still useful in 17 different ways even if you don't actually use it to read the book.

I switched to Zathura and don't look back. I now read my PDF in my own color scheme[1] and totally love the keybindings.

[1] config: https://pastebin.com/raw/NwYB0JNf

Thanks.

This is how it looks: https://i.imgur.com/7LVLJZQ.png

Running Arch as well and I use the Calibre Flatpak to manage my Kindle. I plug it in every month or so and haven't had any failures in the last year. I've found that Flatpaks solve the problem of some older programs not working well on Arch or some programs not getting updated on Debian.

I've never personally used it for epub, but apparently mupdf works with epub files. It's my go-to PDF viewer at least. Just be sure to read the man pages as most operations are keyboard hotkeys.

Mupdf is a better backend for zathura than it is a reader in its own right. It's UI is lacking most notably lacking the ability to access the index.

Make sure you use mupdf-gl rather than mupdf-x11; then press 'o' for toggling the outline/index/table of contents.

Thank you.

foliate seems a great thing, but

    /usr/bin/com.github.johnfactotum.Foliate


 .. come on

This scheme of naming binaries is popular amongst Elementary os apps. Maybe that's were the Dev took the idea from.

I don't mind it, and if it bothers you, you can easily alias it to something else

of course, after you locate the binary in your fs

It is a scheme used by Flatpak.

The package prefix is mandatory, in order for flatpaks not to stomp on each other.

To be exact Flatpak only requires that for exported data files. Since binaries are not exported they can be named anything.

Binaries are not exported, but helper launch scripts are (those that do "exec flatpak run ...").

Oh alright, I didn't realise that

Fbreader is nice, I've only used Calibre for converting ebooks not sure you can read in it.

you can reader using Calibre, it's far from being a good reader

https://news-cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/calibre-ebook-re...

If you open a .mobi in Calibre it takes tens of seconds, on a reasonably fast system, to open small (<2meg) books. I'd agree with the other comments here - Calibre is great in terms of it being powerful (web server to serve up books directly to a kindle without having to plug it in, search is ok once you know how to use it) but has a terrible UI (I shouldn't have to google to discover how to search my local library).

I've been using Calibre-Web[1] as a frontend for the Calibre database, visiting it with my Kobo Auro H2O.

It will do neat things like convert to Kindle & email to the Kindle address with a button press as well so I can give access to my mum and so she can seamlessly read the epub books I have in my library on her Kindle.

It doesn't look great on the Kobo, but I can navigate pretty quickly to download a book, and I hardly ever have to touch calibre itself.

It's pretty easy to get set up running headlessly on a server somwhere.

[1] https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

I liked FBReader until I realized it wasn't displaying the blank lines used by the book series I was reading to separate sections in a chapter. Undoubtably the ebooks' CSS was bad, but other readers, like my Sony e-ink device, displayed them OK.

I am currently using https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf and its one of the amazing software i use daily.

Calibre's ebook-viewer is tolerable when your distro doesn't break Qt5/Calibre; I think that's an Arch problem, unfortunately.

The epubreader addon for Firefox is not perfect, but it is pretty good. It would be better if it would:

- reflow on window size change

- allow me to pick any system font to read in

Impressive, you've tried so much e-readers except the right one: FBreader.

Bookworm definitely has a two-page view. I'm using it on Elementary OS

Two-page view in Bookworm is problematic. See https://github.com/babluboy/bookworm/issues/199

pandoc+emacs. I also use the read-aloud package, which all together makes the best ereader+TTS experience. (However I run the TTS over the lan on a mac, because FOSS text-to-speech is awful.)

Well you forgot FB Reader

Ever tried Evince?

I test it on macOS, it can't work will with epub from Kobo :(

Evince doesn't support EPUB, and the request for support has been marked as WONTFIX (see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=539347).

However, Atril, which was originally forked from Evince, does support EPUB rather well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com