In Operation
This is what you’ll see when running Thorium for the first time.
Add some books and you can start reading.
Highlights include:
- Bookshelf view and reader view.
- Supports a variety of publication formats: EPUB 2, EPUB 3 (the recommended format), DAISY v2.03 / v3, PDF, Audiobooks, and Divinia, the latter is an experimental format for comics, manga, and webtoons.
- Supports the DRM Readium LCP.
- Support for The Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS). Thiscatalog format is a syndication format for electronic publications based on Atom and HTTP. OPDS catalogs enable the aggregation, distribution, discovery, and acquisition of electronic publications.
- Browse OPDS 1 and 2 catalogs.
- Support for OPDS compliant authentication mechanisms.
- Good text highlighting engine.
- Colors, text size, spacing, font and layout can be adjusted.
- Search.
- Bookmarks.
- Keyboard and mouse support.
- Configurable keyboard shortcuts.
- Internationalization support including English, French, Finnish, German, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Georgian, Italian, Portuguese, and many others.
Summary
Thorium is a competent ebook reader. It offers a good range of features, and a lot of thought has gone into its interface. It warrants our recommendation.
It’s good to see that accessibility is high on the developers’ mindset. The program works nicely with various screen readers, and includes a read aloud feature with visual highlighting. It’s a useful tool for visually impaired and dyslexics individuals.
We’d love integration with machine learning tools for text to speech.
The wonderful ps_mem tool reports that memory usage is around 402MB.
Thorium faces stiff competition. Read our roundup of the finest free and open source ebook readers.
Website: www.edrlab.org
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: EDRLab
License: BSD 3-Clause “New” or “Revised” License
Thorium Reader is written in Typescript and JavaScript. Learn TypeScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn JavaScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
Related Software
| GUI eBook readers | |
|---|---|
| KOReader | Versatile document viewer for a wide variety of file formats |
| Koodo Reader | All-in-one ebook reader |
| Foliate | Simple and modern GTK eBook viewer. It's beautifully designed |
| Calibre | e-book library management application with excellent feature set |
| readest | Modern, feature-rich ebook reader |
| Thorium | Desktop reading app, based on the Readium Desktop toolkit. |
| Librum | Modern e-book reader and library manager |
| Lector | Qt based e-book reader |
| Bookworm | Simple, focused e-book reader |
| Arianna | ebook reader and library management app |
| crqt-ng | Fork of the CoolReader project |
| CoolReader | Cross-platform XML/CSS based eBook reader |
| apvlv | PDF/EPUB/TXT/FB2/MOBI/CBZ/HTML …viewer |
| FBReader | Makes it simple to access free literature |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |