Haihaisoft’s Epub Reader is a free and simple viewer that will allow you to read your EPUB e-books on your computer and navigate through their structure in an easy and rewarding way. The program’s interface is clean and intuitive, and it provides text-based links instead of cryptic icons to facilitate navigation through the book.
When opening a new EPUB book, the reader scans its content looking for navigation patterns that can help you move around the text. (This operation is performed automatically and in less than a second, so you will not notice any significant delay in the book loading process.) The reader will then add at the top and the bottom of each page a series of customized links that reflects the book’s navigation features – next/previous chapter, next/previous page, menu, info, rights, etc. The menu includes all the elements that have been marked-up in the EPUB book as navigation links, and that includes the Table of Contents (when available).
Epub Reader also offers you the possibility to search for a specific string of text within the book and zoom the text in and out. Something that I particularly miss is the option to change the font used. As it is now, Times New Roman seems to be the only font available in the program, and – popular as it is – this font is not always the nicest or the most comfortable font to read long texts.
Though it seems to have all the functionality needed to read and navigate also HTML, XHTML, and XML files, it is a pity that Haihaisoft Epub Reader does not allow you to open these other file formats. This possibility would highly enhance the reader’s usability and scope, so it might well be an upgrade to consider in future versions of the product.
A web browser extension that can read aloud accessible, and inaccessible text.
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