There are numerous ePub file readers on Android and I tried several before deciding on one to use for good. Now I bought “The Emotion Thesaurus” which is a reference book I’ll use at my desk, not a reading book. So, I want to open it on my desktop PC. I’ve searched for ebook readers, and the findings were terrible! First, I want something that can simply open a file, and strongly prefer that it can easily be configured to run when I double-click an *.epub file in a file explorer window. So, a program that requires files to be ‘added’ to its own internal library first, as a separate step, is a non-starter. Likewise, programs that only look for book files in specific configured directories! And if it does need to show a File|Open dialog box, please use the standard system one rather than a ‘pretty’ but half-baked one. Hanging forever when I navigate to a directory is simply not acceptable. Requiring click-by-click navigation (no place to paste a full string) when I already know the complete path of the file is very rude. But, as I noted, I generally shouldn’t need the File|Open menu item, as it should be integrated with the Explorer (e.g. take a file as a command-line argument and have the installer register this as a handler for that file type) and be a drop target. And when a file is opened successfully, it should display the contents in a sensible way (why do I even have to say that?!) as the epub book is intended to appear. It must have persistent bookmarks and a Search feature. It must allow copying text to the clipboard (even if it spans a page break). Nice-to-have would be margin and text size configuration, etc. Anyone know of anything?
How about Sigil? It's supposed to be a word processor designed to directly work in ebook formats. I never quite got the hang of it to directly create ebooks in there (writing in another application and exporting to an ebook format works better for me), but I can open and view ebooks including .epub files quite easily with it, and have all the options a word processor offers to work with it. It should be able to be configured as the default application for epub files. At least on my Mac I can, but have not tried it on Win. It's cross-platform, for Win, Mac, and Linux. Downloadable here: https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/Sigil/releases/tag/0.9.8 As long as the ebook is not DRM'ed... in which case you are stuck with an allowed reader, and limited or no copy-paste-options. I know such things can be circumvented, but I cannot condone such actions here, nor will I direct you to tools that can do that.
I've got Nox Android emulator on my PC so I can use a few apps on my desktop. I haven't tried using downloading an ebook app on it, but compatability is pretty stellar so I don't see why there would be a problem using your favourite Android e-reader on it.
Good idea, I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. I use Sigil (on a different machine) for fiddling with the css in ebooks before transferring them to the tablet reader. Even if it doesn’t have a reading mode, the formatted view is certainly usable enough. And I do know that I can use it as an Open action from the file explorer. Thanks! Yes, DRM books can only be used with the specific reader the store uses. I’m not asking about that, but did mention that I had selected a (general purpose) e-reader for Android.
