Command Line e-Book Readers for Linux, Mac, and more
Discover more from The Lunduke Journal of Technology
Command Line e-Book Readers for Linux, Mac, and more
Because sometimes reading in a terminal is darned pleasant.
In my never-ending quest to find the best Terminal / Command Line / Text Mode software on planet Earth, I’ve recently become acquainted with two delightful little applications for reading e-Books right from your Shell.
Both written in Python, and both easily installed on multiple operating systems (Linux, macOS, Windows, etc.).
epy
Epy is a pretty sleek e-Book reader.
Support for all of the major e-Book formats (Epub, Mobi, and AZW), plus a bunch of handy features like bookmarking, progress display, dictionaries, text to speech and more.
Installation instructions are on the Epy GitHub page.
baca
Baca has a lot in common with Epy.
Same supported file formats. Both written in Python, and both easy to install on multiple systems.
The big differences between the two:
Baca is slicker looking with a fancier Text User Interface (including scrolling animations).
But Baca is less mature than Epy and lacks support for bookmarks.
Like Epy, you can find Baca installation instructions on the GitHub page.
Just a thought: Since these applications are both easy to install using Python’s pip… it should be possible to install them within Termux (which lets you run a full Linux shell on Android). Meaning you could have a text-based e-Book reader synchronized between your Android smartphone and your desktop. Or, heck, you could have one of these tools installed on a server that you could SSH into. Quite a handy trick for reading e-Books.
Command Line e-Book Readers for Linux, Mac, and more
I use termux as a calculator, because python is more suited for that than those apps trying to mimic the ui of a traditional calculator. To read ebooks I use LibreraFD, which can also read it to me when I need my eyes to focus on something but not my brain, like sleeping or driving.