Read all your favorite books, stories, manga, and comic books with the help of this stylish, open-source eBook reader
What’s new in Foliate 2.6.3:
- Fixed a performance issue with zipped files (including EPUB files) (Stuk/jszip#716)
A good eBook reader app can mean the difference between putting a massive strain on your eyes while relying on your computer’s browser to open eBooks, and actually reading them with pleasure.
Foliate is one such app, a very good eBook reader designed specifically for Linux that’s also free and open-source. It’s available for all major Linux distros such as Arch Linux, Fedora, Gentoo, Manjaro, MX Linux, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Parabola, just to name a few.
Feature rundown
For starters, let’s look at the basics. Foliate supports the following eBook-related formats: .epub, epub3, .azw, azw3, .mobi, .fb2, fb2.zip, .cbr, .cbz, .cbt, and .cb7, and .txt.
It supports single-column, two-column, and continuous scrolling layouts, as well as touchpad gestures (i.e. two-finger swipe to turn the page).
It has a smart find/search function, a reading progress slider with chapter marks, and provides various customization features such as the ability to adjust the font, line-spacing, and margins, as well as the colors and brightness. It almost goes without saying that you can also zoom in or out, as well as rotate pages to your liking.
A full-featured eBook reader with no compromises
With the basics out of the way, let’s look at Foliate’s more advanced features. You can backup, and sync your reading progress, bookmarks, and annotations as JSON files. You can search for annotations, and export them as plain text, HTML, Markdown, and more.
One of the best features of Foliate is the instant Look-up. This allows you to select words, and get information about them using either Wiktionary or Wikipedia, as well as other offline sources such as DICT and StarDict dictionaries.
Last but not least, Foliate also supports text-to-speech thanks to engines such as eSpeak NG, and Festival, which can pretty much transform your reading experience into a listening one.
Verdict
Foliate is one of the few (in the grand scheme of things) Linux-only apps that look so good and have enough features that one might expect from premium apps of this sort.
Foliate is an eBook reader that ticks all the right boxes by offering users powerful features, support for a wide range of formats, and a high degree of flexibility.
