I’ve got a collection of ePub books that have no DRM so I COULD read them on my computer. I regularly buy books from O’Reilly, Cisco Press and other publishing houses - that’s how I learn a lot of stuff. They come in ePub format which makes great reading - on an iPad. Mac OSX does not have a native method of reading ePub books and the only way to read them is to forward them to Amazon Kindle (by email is easiest for smaller files), or move them into iTunes and read them on an iPad (not so great).
The Kindle app doesn’t make me happy. Can’t put my finger on it but it’s probably the fonts that I don’t like. I have specific font that I use for almost everything and renders well in all situations.
About three months ago, Stairways Software released Bookle which I bought immediately. Stairways has collaborated with TidBits and both companies are well known in the OSX community. This is a super simple app. you just drag & drop the file onto the App, it will import the file into it’s database.
Bookle is stable, work reliably, has no fancy page turning or skeumorphic silliness. It good all round. I recommend it.
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Screen Shot of Bookle - Click for Larger[/caption]
As you can see, I’ve got quite a collection of ePub files including Juniper textbooks and Cisco Nexus 7000 documentation.
I’ve looked into the open source app from the Calibre Ebook project but that app didn’t work for me. It didn’t feel right.
Also, now that I’ve got a MacBook Pro Retina, I find that I’m spending a lot more time reading from the screen because the quality is so good.
Summary. All round good. Go and buy it if you want to read ePub files on your Mac OS X. It’s about ten bucks on the App Store or £6.99 in the Queens currency.
Tip: Automagic Enhancement
I use Hazel to automate the import into Bookle. All I have to do is download the ePub and it will be automatically imported into Bookle. Here is the Hazel setup for that:
More about how I use Hazel is here