How do you read ePubs on your Mac? Here’s how!

Up until VERY recently there has been no way to read DRM-Free ePubs on your Mac, without the use of the excellent ePubReader Firefox plugin. And while the plugin is great for paging through ePubs, how do you:

• Search for code or strings inside that 800+ page ePub on iOS Programming?

• Use MacOS technologies like Spotlight or Quicklook to get at the same data if you have a couple hundred ePubs?

• Aw, isn’t it CUTE that all the (DRM-Free) ePubs in iTunes cannot be opened on your Mac? Let’s fix that!

As some of you know, I’m in a unique situation where I have crappy satcom Internet most of the time, so I’m not reading ‘from the Cloud’ let alone online. But other reasons? Let’s start with the obvious:

Why DRM-Free ePubs?

My answer to that one is ‘why not?’ Instead of buying DRM’d eBooks like college texts for $50-$150 and getting 5-year old ‘stale data,’ you can go to sites like The Pragmatic Programmers or the big daddy of all tech publishers, O’Reilly Media and go DRM-free.

There are even more publishers coming online like Smashwords that cater to much more than tech.

Why would you want to do this?

• For the price of one stale, ‘textbook’ you can buy 5-10 unlocked ePubs, and the data will not be stale (read on),

• Now you can read books without Amazon or others excessively aggregating your data habits ‘to the cloud,’

• The obvious one: You can read your books on any device you own, with no chance of the vendor shutting down a DRM server and you losing your investment(s).

• Because ePubs are reflowable XML content & not format frozen PDF they re-flow nicely on all of your devices: 17” portrait page2 monitor, iPad, teeny iPhone screen. If format matters to you, get the PDF from the vendor, if they offer it.

• In many cases, as with the The PragProg folks and O’Reilly, part of the deal is continuous maintenance. In English, they fix typos and you get to download a ‘new book’ —very important if you’re learning new tech skills.

My name is Leo M, and I am a DRM-free techpub info junkie. Never going back to DRM. And if the saying is true that book publishing is 2 years behind the music industry, neither will you.

Now to the Mac

So, the first thing you should try to do (on Lion or Snow Leppy) is to open the Mac App Store and search ‘ePub’… you’ll find three offerings. The two I will cover here don’t look like iBooks. In fact I, uh, tried that other one but it was too buggy for me. Yes I paid. Grrrrrrrr.

So what do I use and recommend? The two ‘plain readers’.. Murasaki & Scarlett. I vacillate between both…

Before I get to either, I have to mention that both of these Apps are in early days. They have their issues, but both of the Devs are very friendly and respond to bugs, if you find any. Check their websites first, though…

Murasaki

Despite the sparse UI, I can’t believe how useful Murasaki is. Seriously, take a look at the Dev’s site (on Dropbox!)

It comes with a really good Spotlight importer so that you can find things fast:

There are also keybindings so that you can scroll to the bottom of each section and then ‘arrow key’ to the next. Also, you can add CSS user style sheets to override things, like give yourself 100x margin padding as well as a more friendly page background like this:

body { 

    background: #ccccff;
    margin: 100px !important; 

    }

It’s better to keep the css code simple as ePubs vary as to what they’ll let you override. Finally, Murasaki has a Quicklook plugin that shows the first 14 pages of any ePub that you have lying around.. or it will trigger in Spotlight on OS X Lion.

Scarlett

I’m also impressed with Scarlett. For those of you who don’t grok CSS or don’t have the time to drill into ePub CSS overrides, Scarlett has a nice preference interface for you to change the font, background & text colors, etc. Even here, though, the author states that sometimes you won’t get what you want.

Scarlett’s other strength is it’s wonderful Quicklook plugin that also shows the table of contents of the book you’re QL’ing:

Warning though, this plugin will bog down slower machines. That’s why for some Murasaki’s plugin may be a better bet.

Scarlett’s only weakness at the current time, for me, is keybindings. I like to arrow through things. Also, section jumping may be a bit off. But the Dev is friendly, and is working on it. And he wants bugs.

There are other features of these apps that you can explore (like text to speech reading) but I haven’t gotten into those yet. I just want to read!

You could do much worse than buying both of these Apps and keeping the other when you run into different ePubs. Or if you want the Quicklook plugin of one but the ePub Spotlight plugin of the other. They’re both only $8-$9 as of this writing. But—

Uh oh, I have 2 Quicklook Plugins!

Having the Spotlight & Quicklook plugin from both working in Lion looks REALLY cool. And is quite useful.

If you do end up buying both programs, then you may have a problem with conflicting Quicklook plugins. Maybe.

In both cases, even if you purchase from the Mac App Store you can still go into:

/Applications/APPNAME/Contents/Library/QuickLook/

..and then ‘zip up’ the Quicklook plugin that you do not use.

For instance, I use Scarlett’s plugin because I’m willing to ‘wait’ for that funky contents display in Spotlight.

Well, that’s it. These are the tools I now use for my reviews when I’m on my Mac. Happy DRM-free reading!

Disclaimer: Or not: Neither Dev ‘gave’ me their Apps. I bought them so you don’t have to. Actually you should support these Devs until Apple makes iBooks for Mac. Which they may not. Though I wish they would….