The Best E-Readers for Linux

It's been a year since Tolga Balci reviewed FBReader for Linux, more specifically Ubuntu. I thought I would take another look at the options now available to read e-books on a Linux computer. In this article you will find my conclusions.

Introduction

Tolga Balci did a very thorough job of reviewing FBReader in his article. Therefore I will only briefly cover my experiences with FBReader. I also found another great option for reading e-books in Linux. There were a few proprietary applications released by websites that sell e-books for me to look at as well. Other problems of reading e-books on Linux will be covered as well. I will briefly mention converters, which are also important when reading e-books or trying to read e-books.

The list of the best options are at the bottom of the article. Please note that this is "in my opinion"; after trying all of the software yourself, you might form a different opinion. The reviews below are in no particular order.

I have one big problem with all e-readers available for Linux. None of them handle PDF like they should - if they even allow you to read PDF's at all, that is.

FBReader
Rating

FBReader has been around the longest and is in all probability the most popular reader on Linux. FBReader can be installed from repositories on most Linux Distributions.

Features:

• Supported e-book formats are
  * ePub, an international e-publishing standard.
  * fb2, a Russian e-books standard de facto.
  * plucker, one of the most popular Palm e-book format.
  * Non-DRM'd version of Mobipocket, a popular commercial e-book format.
  * More formats.

• Direct reading from tar, zip, gzip and bzip2 archives. (Multiple books in one archive are supported.)
• Automatic library building.
• Automatic language and character encoding detection is supported.
• Automatically generated contents table.
• Embedded images support.
• Footnotes/hyper-links support.
• Position indicator.
• Keeps the last open book and the last read positions for all opened books between runs.
• List of last opened books.
• Automatic hyphenations. Liang's algorithm is used. The same algorithm is used in TeX, and TeX hyphenation patterns are used in FBReader.
• Patterns for Czech, English, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Ukrainian are included in the current version.
• Text search.
• Full-screen mode.
• Screen rotation by 90, 180 and 270 degrees.

FBReader does an excellent job at what it is designed for - reading an e-book is a comfortable experience. Loading books into its library is easy and really doesn't take any advanced knowledge at all. The interface is not dressed up with a lot of buttons you don't need at first glance and is therefore easy to understand and use. I also tried the network search. Network search is supposed to search feedbooks.com & litres.ru. However all of the different searches I tried did not turn up any results. I tried to search for title, author, publisher, all with no result. The lack of PDF support is also a problem. Some publishers (like newspapers for instance) only have a PDF version available. This is why I can only mark this reader with 3 stars.

Lucidor
Rating

Lucidor's feature set is smaller than any of the others. However this could be seen as an advantage to some.

Features:

• Read EPUB e-books.
• Organize a collection of e-books in a local bookcase.
• Search for and download e-books from the Internet, for example by browsing OPDS catalogs.
• Convert web feeds into e-book

When it comes to simplicity, Lucidor takes the prize. The interface hardly has any buttons on the home screen. There are a few links on the home page. There is a list with last read books. To organize the books, it uses a bookcase. Lucidor is built on XULRunner(yes from the Firefox people). This means that it is possible to Skin Lucidor with Firefox themes. The Lucidor website features a list of themes proven to work. The browse catalog feature is great and works awesome. I was able to open an book from feedbooks.com and read it. There are standard catalogs you can open(tip: click on the star).

Browsing the Web with Lucidor is possible, but because Lucidor uses XULRunner, it has the same problems as Firefox(with Flash- and Java-plugins crashing). Lucidor had problems with a New York Times ePub file that has links included in the file. When clicking the links they work, but the previous and next links could overlap the article title. Scrolling sometimes doesn't go as smooth as I would like.

In my opinion Lucidor still needs some work which is why Lucidor only has 3 stars. if it was possible, I would have given Lucidor a 3.5. , which is why it ranks higher in the list of best e-readers for Linux. I believe that when it's fully developed and the current problems are fixed, this would be a great reader.