This review includes free programs for Windows, MacOS, Linux and book services that allow you to read e-books in EPUB format on your desktop or laptop. For examples of displaying EPUB with complex design in different readers I used the book “Leningrad: Architecture of Soviet Modernism. 1955–1991” by Garage Museum Publishing House.
Thorium Reader
The main product of the French project EDRLab is a powerful reader Thorium Reader. It allows you to open books in EPUB format, both version 2 and 3. This means that even the most modern books that use multimedia capabilities will open perfectly in this reader. Thorium Reader has all the necessary settings for comfortable reading on a computer and customising the book “for yourself”. And also there are interesting features: for example, you can switch on automatic book sounding right in the reader. You can connect the system voice of the operating system — the voicing will be at a very good level, the only thing that may be missing is the range of reading speed selection.
The 2.3 version of Thorium Reader was released with gesture support for Touch Screen, magnification of illustrations and improved navigation through hyperlinks within the book.
The reader can be installed on Windows, macOS, and Linux as well.
Apple Books
Macbook users don't have to spend a lot of time choosing a reader: one of the world's best EPUB readers is already installed on their device. Apple Books is almost flawless on the technical side, i.e. it can open an EPUB file of any complexity and not lose the design embedded in the book. Both in terms of usability and design, the Apple reader will give 100 points ahead of most competitors.
The reader's settings cover all major usage scenarios. You can set up hotkeys for switching between pages and chapters, changing font size and other settings. Apple Books can display the fonts embedded in EPUB, but also gives you the option to change the font to one of the reader's fonts. The set of Cyrillic fonts in Books is more interesting than in Thorium Reader. Globally, Apple Books has one drawback: the reader is not available for Windows users.
FBReader
Cross-platform reader FBReader supports EPUB, FB2 and a number of other formats. EPUB is displayed at a very good level, which is even a bit surprising for a reader that was originally oriented on FB2 books with their rather poor formatting. This reader does not have a stylish modern design, but it has a huge number of settings (perhaps for many people excessive), where you can choose any font installed on your computer, adjust the size of all fields, etc.
List of all platforms on which FBReader can run: iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, Linux, Chrome OS.
Calibre
Calibre, the most mentioned e-book reader in such reviews, is regularly updated and in general does not lag behind its competitors in the quality of displaying books in EPUB and other formats. The design of the application itself, however, has not changed or improved much over the years, but that's a matter of taste.
Many readers also use Calibre to store and organise their ebook collections. Unfortunately, many also use the programme to convert files (including some publishers, which is quite surprising). I can't recommend this usage scenario, because Calibre's algorithm, like many other “one button” conversion programmes, creates many problems and the EPUB files resulting from such conversion are not suitable for many technical parameters for readers of many book services. But in Calibre itself these converted files will somehow open and you will be able to read them.
EPUB in a browser
A number of Internet browsers can open EPUB files — for example, Microsoft Edge and Yandex.Browser. And some book services that not only allow you to read by subscription, but also upload user files to their readers, allow you to read these files directly on their site — here we are talking, first of all, about Bookmate. Unfortunately, these readers greatly simplify the formatting of e-books. Books with simple layout you will read without problems, but well-prepared non-fiction books will be displayed not so great.
I think you can see from this review that there are a lot of free programs for reading books in EPUB format on a desktop or laptop (not all of them were included in the review). From them you can choose both programmes suitable for professionals who prepare and check their EPUBs, and for ordinary users who care about design, number of settings or ease of use of the programme.
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