Finding free ebooks to read in Foliate, a GTK ebook reader for Linux desktops, just got a whole lot easier.
The new Foliate 2.2.0 release comes with several enhancements, one of which is better eBook discovery via OPDS. OPDS is the “feed” protocol used by free ebook services like the Gutenberg Project, Standard Ebooks, and Feedbooks to share free works with the wider world.
Having the works available from this repos accessible within the app is a nice touch.
The new “Catalogs” feature (to give it its proper title) is accessible as a tab on the new Library view. You can manually add more OPDS feeds (e.g., the Internet Archive) as well as edit or remove the ones which are there by default.
A dedicated library view has been a frequent request from users of the app so I’m glad to see it added. Implemented as a window separate from the reader panel, the new Foliate library shows all added eBooks by front cover, ordered by recency.
Read progress is shown beneath each item and it’s possible to search for books by metadata (but, alas, not online catalogs).
Foliate 2.2.0 also supports more file formats, including ubiquitous comic book format .cbr and others:
- FictionBook (
.fb2,.fb2.zip) - Comic book archive (
.cbr,.cbz,.cbt,.cb7) - Plain text (
.txt) - Unpacked
.epubfiles
Folaite’s built-in image viewer, which can now be disabled, gains the ability to rotate or invert images when viewing them.
Rounding out this sizeable update is a new option to set maximum page width; a clutch of welcome security fixes; and improved support for vertical and right-to-left books.
Foliate is free open source software for Linux. Source code and a pre-built .deb installer can be found on GitHub:
You can install Foliate on Ubuntu from both Flathub and the Snap Store, though I should caution that the latter (for me at least) is broken since the 2.2.0 update was applied but YMMV:
There’s also an unofficial Foliate PPA available. This repo provides the latest stable release of Foliate to users on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and above:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:apandada1/foliate
sudo apt install foliate