For a while I have been looking into options for slim e-book reader capable of visualising the content of e-books in multiple formats.

Yes, Calibre is doing a great job in handling feeds and cataloguing e-books already as a standalone application, but what if you want to quickly download and take a peak to an e-book or ‘save it for later’?

Especially if you are in the middle of something and just stumbled upon an interesting text reference, most people use bookmarks and then forget about it. If you are like me, however it looks like the bookmarks keeps growing even if you try to be disciplined and use tags or categories and/or use additional plugins to help you keep everything in sync on various computers and search/organise them.

The flexibility of doing stuff within the browser is something that people are accustomed to and bookmarks, tags, sharing features etc. with services like delicio.us, connotea, etc. or on your own desktop are nothing new. For example, for research i absolutely love the Zotero plugin for Firefox when i’m doing research, not only because it helps keeping references, but also because you can create separate searchable libraries.

Anyway, after months of trying and evaluating things, i think i found my preferred plugin for ebooks: the Firefox EPUBReader.

As well as supporting the most common formats like mobi, epub etc, it is a very slim app! (i.e. not another application running on your busy desktops or small laptop computers).

This plugin was already mentioned on teleread back in december, but i think that is now maturing quickly, giving direct access to a couple of huge archives of ebooks directly from the interface: feedbooks.com and archive.org!

Furthermore, Michael (the head and sweat behind the plugin) seems a very motivated and open guy with the intention of keeping up the development of this tool. In fact, to put in my twopence in support of the project I have just completed the translation in italian… who knows, when e-readers catch up over there, people will find it useful!

My suggestion is give it a go!

The other option, which at the moment just seems very clanky and not particularly well developed is Lucifox: in principle it should do the same stuff that EPUBReader is doing, but it will need a lot of work.

Tags: content, e-books, firefox plugin