Looking for a decent eBook-reader

Hardware Librem 5
22

Happily using Calibre Reader. I used Foliate as a temporary substitute for CR when the Pinephone had a QT library issue. Once corrected, I went back to CR and stayed with it when the L5 arrived.

I’m a real bookworm… read over a hundred books with CR. Love it.

1 Like
23

Plus 1 for Calibre. Does what it is supposed to do.

24

I use calibre on my L14 and have been using it on the juno tablet but the experience on the juno tablet, while workable, is less than exhilarating. Resizing is one problem and the other is a good pdf reader which is evince document viewer has issues with copying text.

How is it on the L5?

25

For Foliate, make sure you have “English US” set for Formats (and Language) in Settings / Region & Language.

If it works but you want to keep your language set, you can try setting same LC_ environment variables for Foliate only (using Flatseal). Use ‘env’ from command line to see what is changed when you change Formats from english to your current language.

26

Thanks for thre advice. I have my language set to English, because I like it that way. But I am based in the Netherlands, so there is no way I am gonna change my formats from the proper European ones to imperial measures.

1 Like
27

I’ve been using Calibre on mobile for 2 or 3 years, first on Pinephone/Phosh and then the last 6 months on L5. Before that, I used Moon+ on a SpyDroid. Calibre always functioned well while reading, but was a pain to change settings due to scaling issues. It stopped being a problem for me a long time ago. I’m not sure what changed, but it wasn’t because if compositor scaling (I checked – I have it turned off for Calibre). I sort of doubt that Goyal fixed it because he was pretty rude when I gave him high praise (and a donation) encouraged him to work the setting to score a knockout. Oh well, all is.

At any rate, I don’t think Caibre/L5 is as polished as Calibre/SpyDroid, but I am 100% happy with it… and I read A LOT of books.

1 Like
28

I think the point was … you change the locale settings for one specific application only. So your system as a whole remains as you have set it up but when you run one specific application the locale settings are different. Even that could be unacceptable but maybe for an eBook-reader it wouldn’t cause any objectionable behaviour.

The following may not apply to anything “flat” but it illustrates the point:

date
Sun 18 Jun 2023 15:43:44 AEST
LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8 date
dim. 18 juin 2023 15:43:44 AEST

Voilà!

29

Right.

Even with Formats set to non-English

$ env | grep LC

LC_MONETARY=nl_NL.UTF-8
LC_PAPER=nl_NL.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=nl_NL.UTF-8
LC_TIME=nl_NL.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=nl_NL.UTF-8

You can add this environment variables to your Foliate flatpak using Flatseal:

LC_MONETARY=C
LC_PAPER=C
LC_MEASUREMENT=C
LC_TIME=C
LC_NUMERIC=C

However, in my case, running Foliate fail with wayland:

Failed to create /home/purism/.var/app/com.github.johnfactotum.Foliate/cache for shader cache (No such file or directory)---disabling.
No provider of glFenceSync found.  Requires one of:
    Desktop OpenGL 3.2
    GL_ARB_sync
    OpenGL ES 3.0
    GL_APPLE_sync

I have to use Flatseal to disable for my Foliate flatpak either wayland or GPU acceleration .

30

Ah, okay. That’s a bit more subtle than I thought it was. Thanks!

31

My other question would be: what pdf reader do you use?

Thanks!

32

I finally got around to tweaking Foliate via Flatpak. And it worked!
I needed to change the environment settings and disable the GNU accelaration, and that did the trick.
Thanks!

33

does it still work?
Mine’s given up. Seems something related to the graphic system:

purism@pureos:~$ flatpak run com.github.johnfactotum.Foliate
Portal call failed: Failed to start command: Failed to execute child process “dict” (No such file or directory)
Portal call failed: Failed to start command: Failed to execute child process “sdcv” (No such file or directory)
Failed to create /home/purism/.var/app/com.github.johnfactotum.Foliate/cache for shader cache (No such file or directory)---disabling.
Failed to create /home/purism/.var/app/com.github.johnfactotum.Foliate/cache for shader cache (No such file or directory)---disabling.
No provider of glFenceSync found.  Requires one of:
    Desktop OpenGL 3.2
    GL_ARB_sync
    OpenGL ES 3.0
    GL_APPLE_sync
34

I haven’t changed a thing since then. And it still works.

35

Well, it’s a GTK bug: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5749
As a workaround it is possible to launch Foliate with:
GDK_GL=gl flatpak run com.github.johnfactotum.Foliate
in that way it works (but it’s slower)