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Command Line e-Book Readers for Linux, Mac, and more

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Command Line e-Book Readers for Linux, Mac, and more

Because sometimes reading in a terminal is darned pleasant.

Bryan Lunduke
Mar 28, 2023
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Command Line e-Book Readers for Linux, Mac, and more

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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

screenshot

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_fit

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.

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Command Line e-Book Readers for Linux, Mac, and more

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Command Line e-Book Readers for Linux, Mac, and more

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Barnards Loop
Mar 28

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.

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