Last Updated 2024-03-25
Recently, I wanted to start reading an e-book on my Librem 5, and none of the out-of-the-box solutions worked perfectly for me. After some tinkering, I was able to put together some pieces to have a workable ebook solution, with good readability, quick startup time, decent navigation, and some other helpful features. Please let me know if you think I can improve anything.
Guix is a package manager that I have written about before. It has newer software, that, in this case, worked better for me than the software in the PureOS repo. To install Guix in PureOS:
wget https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/plain/etc/guix-install.sh chmod +x guix-install.sh sudo ./guix-install.sh
After installing Guix, entering guix pull will update Guix. This will take a few minutes.
guix install mupdf
Any .pdf, .txt, or .epub file should work, as long as it doesn’t have harmful Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) encryption anti-features built in. For example, I downloaded a copy of the Open English Bible (OEB):
cd ~/Documents wget https://openenglishbible.org/oeb/2022.1/OEB-2022.1-US.epub
To create an easy-access button, you can use an icon. I always use .svg icons. To download a creative-commons-licensed icon that looks like a book:
cd ~/Downloads wget https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/P_literature.svg
First, move your icon to the icons folder on PureOS:
sudo mv ~/Downloads/P_literature.svg /usr/share/pixmaps/literature.svg
Then, create a script to open your E-book. These are the arguments that I use for my Librem 5 screen, but your preferences may differ:
#!/bin/sh mupdf-gl -S 20 ~/Documents/current_book.epub
And make the script executable:
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/book.sh
Then, you can add a .desktop file to /usr/share/applications/book.desktop:
[Desktop Entry] Type=Application Exec=/bin/sh -c "cd /home/purism/.local/bin && ./book.sh" Icon=literature Terminal=false Categories=Internet Name=Book X-Purism-FormFactor=Workstation;Mobile;
Finally, you should be able to copy your book to the location referenced by the script:
cp ~/Documents/OEB-2022.1-US.epub ~/Documents/current_book.epub
An app with your book icon should appear on your home screen. To pin it to the top of your list of apps for easy access, long-press it and select "Add to Favorites."
Unfortunately, navigation within muPDF is not as good as it could be. I almost entirely use a few simple controls. With the on-screen keyboard, space bar is forward (either to end of page or to next page). "b" key is backward. Forward slash is search. After a search is initiated, "n" key moves to the next result of the search.
Eventually, functionality like this might be packaged up in an app that is useful and easy-to-use on the Librem 5. Maybe such an app already exists without my knowledge of it. In the meantime, this solution provides me with a workable e-book reader. I hope you find this useful or interesting!