How to read a epub book in a terminal

Author: Solène

Date: 17 April 2018

Tags: unix

NILIf you ever had to read an ebook in a epub format, you may have find

yourself stumbling on *Calibre* software. Personally, I don't enjoy

reading a book in *Calibre* at all. Choice is important and it seems

that *Calibre* is the only choice for this task.

But, as the epub format is very simple, it's possible to easily read

it with any web browser even w3m or lynx.

With a few commands, you can easily find xhtml files that can be

opened with a web browser, an epub file is a zip containing mostly

xhtml, css and images files. The xhtml files have links to CSS and

images contained in others folders unzipped.

In the following commands, I prefer to copy the file in a new

directory because when you will unzip it, it will create folder in

your current working directory.

$ mkdir /tmp/myebook/

$ cd /tmp/myebook

$ cp ~/book.epub .

$ unzip book.epub

$ cd OPS/xhtml

$ ls *xhtml

I tried with differents epub files, in most case you should find a lot

of files named chapters-XX.xhtml with XX being 01, 02, 03 and so

forth. Just open the files in the correct order with a web browser aka

"html viewer".