Comment by carlosjobim
11 hours ago
My wish is to see ebooks become first class citizens on all digital devices. Apple has a native ebook reader built in to their devices. It's cumbersome and bloated, but it's there. No web browser except Yandex has built in ebook support, even though it would be the easiest thing in the world. Android, Linux and Windows have no built-in ebook reader, as far as I know.
Murasaki [1] is the most performant and sleek ebook reader you can get for MacOS currently. It's magnificent, but the creator has regionally limited who can get it, unfortunately.
The old Microsoft Edge had epub support, and even a nascent ebook shop and a nifty note-taking/annotation mechanism (there was even a restitution payment made for folks who had taken notes), but Microsoft gave up on it when they shifted to a rebadged Chrome.
I really appreciate you mentioning Murasaki - thank you. I've been looking for something like this for a long time, because every single EPUB "reader" out there does so much more than just read EPUBs. This one does just that, I love it.
to be honest, I use the calibre ebook viewer without bothering with calibre itself (so far) and I find it to be good at what it does
I'm also using Calibre, but the ebook viewer is really clunky, I'm not a big fan.
To be fair, desktop linux doesn't really have built-in anything (except what's appropriate for a kernel, like filesystems and a TCP stack...). Many linux distributions package epub readers (calibre, okular, fbreader, bookworm), and they tend to be really easy to install.
It doesn’t seem like it’s a huge ask imo, and I’m also pretty surprised that they have such limited support, a mostly text format like epub really should be simple to add functionality for.
Less surprising but still annoying is how many hoops you need to jump through to get a good reading experience for manga, particularly on macOS. I had to try many options that were either too buggy, too difficult to install correctly, various aggressive paywalls, or straight up don’t function with high quality scans.
Eventually I landed on one(will edit the name in when I have access to my laptop) that functions well but has some memory issues in importing books, possibly a memory leak.
Maybe I’ve just become shit at finding apps in the modern unsearchable age, but it really feels like reading of all types has diminished enough that we are an unserviceable market.
*The software I landed on is Koodo Reader