Home The Web EPUB Viewer

[UPDATE: This page is outdated. It is kept here only for historical purpose. To read EPUB books, please use Web Books Viewer.]

http://www.web-books.com/Web/E1.html.

The above Web page is a new type of software known as "Offline Web Applications". It can directly read the downloaded EPUB books, without connecting to the internet. There is no need to install. As soon as you access the Web page, it starts working.

How to Use

When you first visit the Web EPUB Viewer (the above Web page) using supported browsers, it will create a database on your computer/device. All book contents will be stored in this database and the Viewer can retrieve book contents from the database. To add EPUB books into the database, click Add To Library at the top left of the Viewer. Then, select an EPUB book (with .epub extension) that has been downloaded to your computer and click the "Add Book" button.

To read books offline, the Viewer should be stored on your computer. Do not use "save as" to save the Viewer. Your browser will automatically do it for you. The browser may ask your permission. Select "Allow" if you would like to read books offline. For future access, just bookmark the Viewer. Then, you can read all EPUB books on your computer without connecting to the internet.

Supported Browsers

The Viewer should work on any computer, tablet or smartphone with a browser supporting a few features in HTML5. At present, only the latest versions of FireFox (Version 4 and above) and Chrome (Version 13 and above) have implemented the required features, especially the database called IndexedDB, which is used to store book contents. FireFox is recommended because Chrome has a storage limit of only 5 MB. However, in the Mobile Version, Chrome can store a large amount of book contents in another database called SQLite.

Speed

File manipulation of the Web-based software is slower than traditional software. On a typical laptop, it may take about 10 seconds to add a 2 MB EPUB file into the database. A file of 4 MB would take about 20 seconds. If it takes longer than 10 seconds or so, your browser may ask you whether to continue or not. Select "Continue" if expected. Otherwise, stop it. After an ebook is successfully added into the database, the Viewer should display its first page.

Removing a large file from the database also takes a few seconds. Wait until the Viewer responds with "Done".

For Web Books, the speed to add a large book file into the database is much faster because we have developed a special ZIP utility that does not compress images and therefore the Web Books Viewer does not need to spend time in decompressing images.

Features

Web EPUB Viewer and Web Books Viewer share the same database. After an EPUB book is imported into the database, it can be viewed by the Web Books Viewer. For this reason, we will not include new features in the Web EPUB Viewer. You may use the EPUB Viewer to import EPUB books into the database and read them by the Web Books Viewer which will have these features:

Those with links are already available in the latest version of the Web Books Viewer. Please follow the links for more information.

 

 

Last updated: August 30, 2011