How to read a epub book in a terminal

If you ever had to read an ebook in a epub format, you may have find yourself stumbling on Calibre software. Personally, I don’t enjoy reading a book in Calibre at all. Choice is important and it seems that Calibre is the only choice for this task.

But, as the epub format is very simple, it’s possible to easily read it with any web browser even w3m or lynx.

With a few commands, you can easily find xhtml files that can be opened with a web browser, an epub file is a zip containing mostly xhtml, css and images files. The xhtml files have links to CSS and images contained in others folders unzipped.

In the following commands, I prefer to copy the file in a new directory because when you will unzip it, it will create folder in your current working directory.

$ mkdir /tmp/myebook/
$ cd /tmp/myebook
$ cp ~/book.epub .
$ unzip book.epub
$ cd OPS/xhtml
$ ls *xhtml

I tried with differents epub files, in most case you should find a lot of files named chapters-XX.xhtml with XX being 01, 02, 03 and so forth. Just open the files in the correct order with a web browser aka “html viewer”.