Well, that too has already been done, in the form of Readium, which you should take a look at. All this is essentially what epubjs does.īut I intuit from your question that you want to do this entirely on the client/browser side. While you're at it, parse out the title and other interesting metadata. Write a small server component which parses the file normally called content.opf, and based on the order of the files in the manifest element, emit some HTML which has a forward and back button and an iframe to show the content.

What about moving from one page to the next? You'll need to know what order the pages are supposed to be displayed in. You want a table of contents? Navigate to the toc.xhtml or equivalent file and there you go. Unzip the epub file somewhere on your server, and navigate the browser to one of the pages. If you can write it in one language or for one platform, you can write it in or for another.īut actually, you don't even need to write a reader, since epubs are just little websites in a can.

In any case, your question is a specific form of the generic question, is is possible to write an an ebook reader for epubs? Obviously, yes it is, may have been written. Why do you want to write an epub reader? There are already many out there. Is it possible to display epub format books in web browser using pure HTML5, CSS and jQuery?

Readium epub