EpubReader

About the Reader

The epubreader application is based on the epub.js library and is a fork of the epub-reader repository.

Getting Started

Open up epubreader in a browser.

You can change the ePub it opens by passing a link to bookPath in the url:

?bookPath=https://s3.amazonaws.com/epubjs/books/alice.epub

or to open through path public/epub-book folder

?bookPath=epub-book/[filename].epub

Running Locally

Install node.js

Then install the project dependencies with npm

npm install

Next you need to clone the repository into local with below command

git clone <repo_url>

After that, you need to move to repo directory. You can run the reader locally with the command

cd <repo_directory>
npm start

The application automatically starts at localhost:8088.

Builds are concated and minified using webpack

To generate a new build run

npm run build

or rebuilding all *.js files

npm run prepare

Pre-configuration

The epubreader application settings is a JavaScript object that you pass an argument to the Reader constructor. You can make prelimitary settings in the file index.html. For example, this is what the default Reader initialization looks like:

<script type="module">
    import { Reader } from "./js/epubreader.min.js"
    const url = new URL(window.location)
    const path = url.searchParams.get("bookPath") || "https://s3.amazonaws.com/moby-dick/"
    window.onload = (e) => new Reader(path)
</script>

Let's say we want to disable the openbook feature, which is designed to open an epub file on a personal computer. This can be useful for integrating a public library into your site. Let's do this:

<script type="module">
    import { Reader } from "./js/epubreader.min.js"
    const url = "{{bookPath}}"
    window.onload = (e) => new Reader(url, { openbook: false })
</script>

Note that the {{bookPath}} replacement token is used to define the url string variable. This simple solution will allow you to set up a route to pass the target URL.

Features

The epubreader application supports the following features:

Initial support for mobile devices
Saving settings in the browser’s local storage
Opening a book file from the device’s file system
Bookmarks
Annotations
Search by sections of the book
Output epub metadata
Keybindings