How to open an ePub?
The range of e-book formats is quite wide andnot limited only to FB2 and DjVu. E-books are often stored in ePub format. If you have an electronic "reader", it is likely to open a book in this format. But than to open ePub on the computer?
ePub is an abbreviation for Electronis Publication. This open format was developed by the IDPF (International Forum on Digital Publications). The ePub format is used for documents in which text is the most important part. In addition to the actual text in HTML, XHTMLor PDF, the ePub file can contain a description of the publication in XML, graphics (bitmap and vector), embedded fonts, styles, etc. How to open an ePub if you do not have an e-book at hand?
There are a number of free programs for Windows that allow you to open an ePub on a personal computer. One such program is Adobe Digital Editions. This free program, developed by AdobeSystems, is used for reading and managing electronic books in the formats ePub, PDF and XHTML. Read books are downloaded to the program library. It supports the selection of text, creating notes and bookmarks, selecting the font size, searching the text, printing the necessary fragments of text, navigating through the pages.
You can also open ePub with a free program CoolReader. In addition to ePub, this program supports a number ofother formats of electronic books, as well as graphic formats. The program supports the contents of books, tables and CSS in ePub-files. There are different viewing modes (pages or scroll, displaying one or two pages in landscape mode, full-screen viewing, page rotation). It supports bookmarks, text selection, text search, cross-references, hyperlinks, footnotes, automatic hyphenation.
You can open ePub and the program FBReader. This is a free cross-platform applicationfor reading e-books supports most popular formats. We already talked about this program in our article "Free programs for reading FB2 books", so we will not dwell on it in detail. By the way, in the same article you can read about two more e-book programs that ePub can open - Caliber and STDU Viewer. You can also use Windows the following applications: AlReader, Emerson, ICE Book Reader, Lexcycle Stanza, Lucidor, Mobipocket Reader, Talking Clipboard.
But than opening an ePub if you are using an operating system other than Windows? For each operating system, there are programs that allow you to read e-books in this format. We list some of them:
For Android: Aldiko, Bookmate, FBReaderJ, Foliant, WordPlayer, Moon + Reader;
For Linux: Caliber, CoolReader, Emerson, FBReader, Lucidor, Okular;
For Mac OS X: Adobe Digital Editions, BookReader, Caliber, Emerson, Lexcycle Stanza, Lucidor;
For iOS: Bookmate, exLibris, iBooks, Lexcycle Stanza (for iPhone), sReader (for iPhone), Bluefire Reader;
For mobile platforms: AlReader (Windows Mobile, Windows CE), Foliant (J2ME), Bookmate (Symbian), FBReader (PDA's), Freda (Windows Mobile), Mobipocket Reader (Windows Mobile, Symbian, BlackBerry), Okular (Maemo).
If you use Mozilla Firefox browser (regardless of the operating system), you can open ePub directly in the browser, but for this you need to install on it special add-on - EPUBReader. It is installed the same way as any otheradd-on for Firefox. Addition allows you to create a personal library, access to which does not depend on the connection to the Internet. You will be able to read books in ePub format via a browser. The add-on supports page navigation, text selection, font size change, text search, bookmarks and notes. You can send a piece of text to a friend or print it.
As you can see, you can open ePub with a lot of programs, no matter what device or operating system you use. A the final choice of the program is a matter of taste and convenience.
