Now, version 3.6 has been released for both Mac and Windows. I downloaded the Mac version and it is definitely faster than 3.5. I’ve been using Chrome recently, but it isn’t a finished product yet and needs work – it’s printing is especially poor, so I’m going to go back to Firefox and see how 3.6 runs.

Let’s hear how it is doing for you.

Hello Paul,

I’m contacting you, because I’d like to inform you about a new free Firefox addon called “EPUBReader” with which you can read ePub files directly in Firefox. EPUBReader is developed by me. I thought you could be interested in this information and if you publish an article where this fits in, it would be great if you could mention it.

Here some more background information:

Before I started the development, I checked if something similar exists. Of course I found OpenBerg, but OpenBerg seems not to support Firefox 3.*. So I decided to write a new addon which would support the current Firefox versions.

- Why use EPUBReader instead of a special ePub-reading software?

Of course there is free software out there to read ePub-files on your PC. The difference is that you have to install and start a new software, in case of EPUBReader you can just use a program (Firefox) you probably use anyway.

The main reason why I thought it would be a good idea to create EPUBReader as an Firefox addon is, that an ePub-file is basically an archive of HTML-files. So why not use a program which is specialized in displaying HTML-files and many people have already installed? The great benefit is, that in that way you don’t have to bother with rendering and display of the HTML-files because Firefox does this for you. So the limit of what is possible to display is set by Firefox and not by a special ePub-software. And I think Firefox is always at the cutting edge.

- How can you navigate through an ePub-file?

This is probably the main difference between EPUBReader and other ePub-reading software. EPUBReader just displays the ePub-file as it is: there are several HTML-pages with the content and a Table of Contents which links the HTML-pages, that’s it. Other reader-software simulates pages which don’t exist in reality to give you the feeling you read a real book. To reach this goal they have to do calculations which decreases performance. My decision was to keep it as simple as possible which also means as fast as possible. This resulted in the mentioned navigation. I received already feedback concerning this topic: some people don’t like it, because they want to jump from page to page like in books, other people like it because of it’s simplicity and speed.

Here is a link to EPUBReader’s homepage, where you can find a FAQ and a link for installation. I have uploaded the addon to the Mozilla Addon website. You can see there, that the addon is still marked as “experimental”. This means that it’s still not reviewed by Mozilla (which unfortunately takes several weeks). Nevertheless, according to the feedback I received, the addon works pretty good.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Thank you very much.

Kind Regards,

Michael Volz