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Archive for the ‘Firefox’ Category

EPUB reader add-on for Firefox

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

By Paul Biba

firefox.pngI received the following email from Michael Volz. I’m on a Mac and the add-on won’t install in the Mac version of Firefox so I can’t report how it works. If anyone tries it, let us know. It’s available here.

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.

(more…)

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