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ePub3 has become very popular in the recent years because it has had some style-improvements entails much more than before. I am looking for a good ePub viewer that is simple but has great functionality as well. I prefer if there is no download/installation. Any experience? Thanks in advance!

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    I use the one that comes with Calibre Ebook Library! Download it here: calibre-ebook.com/download Or use the old one from the software repository (shoppingbasket) Aug 29, 2016 at 9:48
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    I'm usually using KDE okular.
    – Hi-Angel
    Aug 29, 2016 at 10:03
  • I think the question is specifically about programs that work well with the modern ePub version 3 format, including all its formatting options, etc.
    – JanC
    Aug 29, 2016 at 10:16
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    @angelina maybe you can link to an example document that is legally available for free download which people can use to test these features?
    – JanC
    Aug 29, 2016 at 10:19

3 Answers 3

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Calibre ebook reader from the default Ubuntu repositories does not natively support saving highlighting, only temporary highlighting of a single text snippet to select it for copy/paste. According to the developer of Calibre there are no plans to add this feature to Calibre either. Except for the missing highlighting/annotation feature, Calibre is a versatile ebook library management application that can do almost anything.

There is a project on GitHub called whacked/calibre-viewer-annotation that adds annotation/highlight capability to Calibre. whacked requires sqlalchemy as a dependency which can be installed by:

sudo apt-get install python-pip   
sudo pip install sqlalchemy  

About the requested no download/installation, I'm sorry to report that whacked does require downloading, and its installation is more complicated than you wished for, so I think it's intended for geeks.

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I tested with epub3 sample file, okular works just fine. Okular 0.25.0 version is here.

To highlight text and paragraphs click Tools → Review, a review bar would appear.

You can install it with sudo apt install okular.

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The ebook reader I have been using for some time is Calibre. I like that I can format fonts and font colours easily. Also, you can save themes. Another important factor for me is that there is a full screen mode where I can change pages using the keyboard keys. You can also enable a clock in fullscreen mode so that you do not lose track of time.

Another one that I have been considering is FBreader. It does not have as much functionality as calbre but it is cross platform. This means that you can pick up reading on your phone where you left of on you ubuntu computer.

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