If you are looking to find the best eBook reader app for Ubuntu, Linux Mint or other Linux distros, you’ve turned to the right page!
Ebook readers like Amazon Kindle, Kobo, as well as general-purpose tablets and smartphones are the way most people prefer to read eBooks. Holding it in your hand feels more like a book, I guess.
But you can read ebooks on your PC and laptop too.
To read ePub ebooks on Ubuntu you do need to install an ebook reader app, since the distribution does not included one out of the box.
All of the ebook reader apps in this list handle the basics (letting you read), but a couple go further, letting you adjust font size, paragraph sizing, add annotations, bookmarks, and more.
Tip: You can download free ebooks from The Gutenberg Project. A huge range of titles are available, available in both ePub and mobi (Kindle-friendly) formats, and some in PDF. For our tests we used a copy of The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells.
5 Ebook Reading Apps for Linux
Bookworm
The back-cover blurb for open source ebook app Bookworm bills it as being a ‘simple’ and ‘focused’ app.
Like other software in this list, Bookworm is both an ebook manager as well as a reader. As well as allowing you to open and read .epub, .PDF, .cbr, .cbz and .mobi files, the app provides tool to organise, sort and edit metadata for them too.
For Epub and Mobi files you can increase or decrease the font size, adjust margins, line height and background colour, and make other customisations easily enough. There’s a handy pop-over menu in the toolbar.
Bookworm includes 3 profile themes: light (pictured), sepia, and dark (the latter inverts book contents so that text is white on a dark background).
The clean, uncluttered UI ensures your focus stays squarely on the page. Keyboard arrow keys let you turn pages forwards and backwards, while a scrubbable progress slider displayed at the bottom of the window makes it easy to move back farther.
Other toolbar options can display a table of contents (if there is one), bookmark a page, search for text or phases, and more.
Bookworm features at-a-glance:
- Supports .epub, .mobi, .cbr/cbz, .pdf
- Lets you edit metadata, including cover art
- Options to customise the reader appearance
- In-book text searching
- Bookmark support
I do find that PDF rendering is poor, and the app lack tools other apps in this list provide, like page zoom, side-by-side (aka dual-pane) reading that dedicated apps such as Evince (for .pdf) and MComix (for .cbr).
Summary: Bookworm is the best all-round eBook reader app on Ubuntu — but not for PDFs.
To install Bookworm on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and above, add this PPA to your software sources:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bookworm-team/bookworm
sudo apt update && sudo apt install bookworm
Easy eBook Viewer (GTK+)
The succinctly named ‘Easy Ebook Viewer‘ is, as you might guess from its name, an ebook viewer. As such you won’t find any collection management or metadata editing features here.
But, out of all the apps on this list, Easy Ebook Viewer renders .epub files the best.
And that’s crucial as it doesn’t support any other formats.
The toolbar across as the top of the app lets you can quickly jump to any given page (just enter the page number in the box), has page navigation, and a toggle to get access to a book’s contents page in a sidebar.
The app saves your reading position so that you can quickly resume where you left off when you re-open it. You can use keyboard arrow keys to turn pages, and the preferences hides a basic ‘night mode’.
Although perfectly fine as a reading app a few customisation features wouldn’t hurt, e.g., some control over font sizing, margins, etc.
But perhaps biggest drawback in using this app is that it’s not that easy to install! You can grab the source code from Github and compile it yourself, just be sure to have the relevant GTK Webkit package installed first.
Summary: Easy Ebook Viewer is a simple, lightweight tool that looks greats on the GNOME desktop.
Buka Ebook Reader & Manager
Buka is a relatively new open-source app that’s designed for reading and managing PDF ebooks.
Many ebooks, particularly text books and manuals, come as PDF files. Ubuntu has a basic PDF viewer pre-installed (called ‘Evince’) but Buka is a dedicated reader app designed to “help users focus more on the content” and less on the window chrome that surrounds it.
Buka lets you move between pages of a PDF using your arrow keys (or toolbar buttons); adjust page zoom; view 2 pages side-by-side; and search for text in compatible documents. Should you need it you can also rotate individual pages of a PDF.
For managing your PDFs Buka lets you create separate lists, e.g., ‘Textbooks’, ‘Manuals’, etc, and switch between them easily.
But my favourite feature is the built-in translation tool. It’s network dependant (so won’t work without internet) but is helpful for quickly understanding snippets or phrases of text in documents that aren’t in your native language.
Summary: Buka is a compelling PDF reader app for Ubuntu with many useful features.
Calibre Ebook Software
I’d majorly surprised if you had not already heard about Calibre. It’s a well-established, cross-platform, ‘swiss-army-knife’ of ebook apps.
‘Like overly descriptive prose most of Calibre’s UI is unnecessary.’
It’s perfectly usable as an ebook reader and supports pretty much every format you can throw at it.
Calibre can convert ebooks from one format to another, edit meta-data, add comments, replace cover art, sync with Amazon Kindle, Nook, and Android devices, and… Well, you get the idea: it can do a lot.
But if all you want to do is read books then Calibre comes undone. The viewer opens in a separate window with a nasty, oversized vertical toolbar. The impression given is confusing, cluttered and cumbersome. Like overly descriptive prose most of Calibre’s UI is unnecessary.
Consider Calibre the sprawling multi-book epic to the lightweight summer-reads of other apps on this list.
Summary: A ‘swiss army knife’ of options, but confusing to new users.
GNOME Books
GNOME Books the least mature ebook app on this list, but it is available to install from Ubuntu Software.
More of a manager than a reading app, GNOME Books is able to list all of the ePub, Mobi and CBR files you keep in your home folder, and lets you create ‘collections’ from them — which is handy!
But, oddly, the app is only able to display ePub books — which is confusing!
Feature wise GNOME Book offers more of a pamphlet than a novel. You’ll find no formatting options, no page zooming, no dual-page split screen, and zero support for creating or viewing bookmarks.
You can text search though, and page turning works with your keyboard arrow keys. The app also conveniently remembers the last read page, making it easy to pick up where you last left off.
Summary: GNOME Books is a basic, no-frills eBook reader for Linux.
Best Ebook Reader Apps: Conclusion
Five different ebook readers, all with their own distinct narratives. If you’re looking for an app to open and read ePub eBooks on Ubuntu and would like some basic library features too, Bookworm is well worth picking up.
But each of the other entries have their own merits too.
If you read ePub or PDF eBooks on Ubuntu, and have a favorite app, we’d love to hear why you love it in the comments below!