Ebook library

LIBRUM READER

Bookworm Nate Drake helps you galvanise your ebook collection and place it in the cloud with Librum Reader and Calibre.

Credit: https://librumreader.com

OUR EXPERT

Nate Drake is a technology journalist specialising in cybersecurity and retro tech. He has taken to devouring ebooks late at night as they’re not nearly as fattening as Oreos.

QUICK TIP

Although we recommend installing via Flatpak, if you’re determined to build the Librum client from source, you can find instructions on https://github. com/Librum-Reader/Librum. If you’re running Ubuntu, install both libgl1mesa-dev and libxcb-cursordev first.

When it comes to ebooks, in some ways Linux users are spoilt for choice. There’s any number W of excellent apps, such as Bookworm and Foliate, for opening EPUB and MOBI formats. The mighty Calibre is also incredibly useful for converting between formats, as well as downloading metadata.

Given the open source approach to OS design, however, Linux doesn’t always play well with DRM (digital rights management) protected content. This may be why there’s no native Amazon Kindle desktop client. Naturally, there are some workarounds. You can still use Linux versions of web browsers to manage Kindle content in your account. The desktop client can also be run through a compatibility player like Wine or PlayOnLinux, but this can cause performance issues.

In this guide, you’ll discover how to download, manage and read your ebook collection with ease using our chosen program: Librum Reader.

Why Librum?

Given the huge amount of software available for this purpose, we feel we should explain briefly why we’ve settled on Librum Reader.

Aside from Librum Reader being open source and receiving rave reviews online, during our tests Bookworm crashed repeatedly when performing simple operations like looking up definitions of words.

Librum also offers a clean, intuitive interface, making it easy to view and sort through your ebook collection. Currently supported formats include PDF, EPUB, CBZ (comic books), FB2, TIFF, MOBI and XPS.

If this weren’t enough, the free pricing tier offers users 1GB of cloud storage so you can manage your ebook collection across multiple devices. Self-hosting is also supported.

Getting started

To start organising your ebooks, head to the Librum main site (https://librumreader.com). Power users may prefer to follow the link to the GitHub page to clone the repository and compile the software themselves.

However, it’s much simpler to choose Download > Flatpak. This redirects you to the Librum Reader page on Flathub. Click Install to download the necessary reference file. Next, minimise your browser and open the terminal. Switch to your downloads folder with: $ cd ~/Downloads Double-check Flatpak is installed correctly with: $ sudo apt install flatpak Press Y to confirm installation if necessary. You can now install Librum Reader with: $ flatpak install com.librumreader.librum.flatpakref Enter Y to proceed. Once our install completed, we noted that the Librum Reader icon didn’t appear in the Activities section of Ubuntu Gnome immediately. You can fix this by restarting your machine. Alternatively, run this command: $ flatpak run com.librumreader.librum