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

My favorite thing about Foliate:

> 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…

Does it manage my "library" for me?

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?

Foliate is really good with the security aspects of rendering ebooks. See the author's foliate-js library project (https://github.com/johnfactotum/foliate-js?tab=readme-ov-fil...).

I've recently written an article about the dangers of ebooks. Maybe it's of interest to some: https://gebir.ge/blog/every-trick-in-the-book/

I used to read all ebooks on desktop when smartphones didn’t enter the market. Now I read on Kindle and a dedicated tab.

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.

I used to always install Foliate when I installed a new linux distro though it only opens epub and not pdf's. The default on linux is Evince for Pdf.

Koodo is the way to go

However, more recently I have been using "Koodo" reader and library for both epub and pdf

It has a great visual library too. I only use Koodo now.

https://github.com/troyeguo/koodo-reader

http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/koodo-reader-bin

I’d love to have a beautifully designed version of Calibre for macOS. I’d even pay for it! It would be fantastic to have a sleek way to organize my ebook collection, especially if it could also store papers from Arxiv etc.

I’ve not been happy with the state of desktop ebook readers for a while, so I recently built a simple web-based ebook reader. It’s designed to be a quick and easy way to read books while also providing decent layout and typography.

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

I have been testing this for 15 minutes.

- enforces two page layout. I don't see how to fix it. advice does not fix it: https://github.com/johnfactotum/foliate/discussions/1166

- can't open all pdf that other viewers can.

- zoom does not work, settings do nothing.

Result of the 'style' is smudge view you can't fix.

I love this on my laptop - but struggling for iOS - particularly iPad - any good suggestions? I just want to read books, keep my place and not have any ads -is this that hard?

Linux needs more beautiful apps with attention to UX - the same kind of care that developers of macOS apps put into their apps. That's why even when I'm building an app for Linux[1] I start by trying to make the best macOS app first.

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

EDIT: Spelling errors.

I wish this worked on Windows too. In general, I'd love to see all those lovely GTK4 apps on Windows, they look so nice.

I’m using this app’s EPUB engine for my iOS/macOS app, Manabi Reader, which is for learning Japanese through reading (but I want to expand to more languages and general purpose use soon)

https://reader.manabi.io

This look pretty neat, wish there were some decent ebook readers for Android that can handle both pdf and ebpub....I was looking into moon reader but it requires an obnoxious breadth of permissions that seems very odd. Calibre is still my go-to on windows

For KDE Plasma users that dislike non-native looking GTK apps I can recommend https://apps.kde.org/en/arianna/

I installed snap version of Foliate on Ubuntu20.04. And it failed to work for me (when I open a valid epub, it is just blank). I’m so disappointed when I see something that I badly want and it doesn’t work.

Can't view images.

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.

> Enjoy features such as auto-hyphenation

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.

The app looks beautiful, but I can’t unsee the clipped buttons at the top and bottom on the left. Why wouldn’t you use the same border radius as the window? Or have the window not be rounded?

foliate is pretty good for epub. I have been using it for several months, and definitely prefer it to fbreader, calibre, etc. It is much faster than those. It has a good TTS interface as well.

I love this app! I recently went shopping for Linux readers and came right back to Foliate for its common sense and feature-richness beneath a clean UX.

Looks beautiful! While I mostly read on kindle, this makes me want to setup a new Ubuntu install. Haven't had that feeling in a while

This looks like a decent PDF reader too, especially with Adobe's decision to cease shipping the Acrobat Reader to Linux

This is my favorite e-book reader to use on my desktop :) (it's great for epubs)

i need something like this for the chromebook / android..

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

Been trying to use it on windows. Best app for linux.

Is there something like this for Windows?

its written in javascript, I dont want javascript apps on my system

Does it have a dark mode?

Is there a nice ebooks reader on android. The options I keep running to are rather very disappointing

been trying to use it on windows. Its a great app on linux.