Lector (software)

Lector is a free e-book reading application for desktop GNU/Linux systems that also has basic collection management features.[1]

Lector
Initial releaseNovember 2017
Stable release
0.5.1 / 9 March 2019
Repository
Written inPython, Qt
Operating systemLinux
Available in8 languages
List of languages
Chinese, Czech, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish
LicenseGPL
Websitegithub.com/BasioMeusPuga/Lector 

Features

It deals with both popular e-book formats and comic books: EPUB, Mobipocket, AZW(3/4), comic book archive (CBR/CBZ), Portable Document Format (PDF), DjVu, FictionBook (FB2)[2] It does not support files with digital rights management.[3]

Reviews frequently acclaimed the user interface. Lector opens to an overview of the book collection ("library"), which can be sorted by the content of different metadata fields or last reading time and can search/filter titles. It can be configured as an array of book cover thumbnails or as a simple table. A book metadata editor is available via the context menu.

The reading view has a distraction-free mode, saves the reading position[1] and offers zoom controls, full-text search, text annotations[1] and an integrated dictionary. Text rendering (font, size, spacing) and page color can be configured. It can save several configuration profiles, switch between them and export them. Bookmarks can be organized via a sidebar. There are no animations for e.g. page turning.

Distribution

Lector is released as Free Software, and thus with its complete source code, under the terms of the GNU General Public License in version 3 or later on GitHub. It has been included in the default package repositories of Arch (AUR), openSUSE[4] and Gentoo.

Technology

The application is written in Python, using Qt 5 widgets via PyQt for the user interface. Given a folder with e-books, it indexes them in place. Metadata and cover images are stored in a SQLite database.[1]

History

It was started by a Spanish programmer known as BasioMeusPuga.[3] He started publishing code on GitHub in November 2017.[5] The first official release (version 0.1) was on March 10, 2018. Initially there was no support for annotations or text highlighting, neither for PDF files. Preliminary PDF support via Poppler was released in spring 2018 in version 0.2.[6][1]

gollark: I care about the soundness and sanity of the things I build, somewhat.
gollark: You have to have it do *an* extra network round trip in order to not have to statically include the stuff in the page and run into the issue the whole external navbar thing is meant to solve.
gollark: It is then harder to change.
gollark: With server rendering: client gets HTML page from server, draws it.With client rendering: client gets HTML page, partly draws it, notices JS in it, fetches JS, executes it, draws result.
gollark: There is an ADDITIONAL NETWORK ROUND TRIP!

Sources
  • Okoi, Martins Divine (2018-03-22). "Lector – A Qt Based eBook Reader for Linux". FOSSMint. Retrieved 2020-05-26.
  • Sneddon, Joey (2018-03-16). "This Qt eBook App for Linux is a Real Page Turner". OMG! Ubuntu!. Retrieved 2020-05-26.

References
  1. https://data-flair.training/blogs/python-open-source-projects/
  2. Williams, Rebecca (2018-03-21). "Download Lector For Ubuntu 20.04 – Fresh Qt eBook reader for Linux". Ubuntu Free. Retrieved 2020-05-26.
  3. "lector package versions - Repology". repology.org.
  4. "Initial commit · BasioMeusPuga/Lector@b7d130f". GitHub.
  5. "Release Prosthetic Conscience · BasioMeusPuga/Lector". GitHub.
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