I'll take a look at this, as my long rant on what's wrong with browsers[1] basically ends up with the admission that something along the lines of Calibre or Zotero is probably more of what I want from a reading app: the ability to manage a library of works, local, networked, or on the Web, with a highly uniform presentation (ignore virtually
all document formatting in favor of my own preferences).
From my relatively light explorations of Calibre to date (v. 1.25 on Debian jessie/sid):
⚫ The UI is clunky. Especially when trying to edit / capture bibliographic information I've found it beyond frustrating.
⚫ The built-in readers are severely brain-damaged and I've found no way to change them. The PDF reader is complete and total fail, the eBook reader isn't much better, and I seem to recall that accessing HTML docs is similarly frustrating.
By contrast, I've been impressed by the Moon+Reader Android eBook reader, generally like the Readability online (Web) reader and Android app, and had found a Debian eBook reader that was fairly decent client -- fbreader. Its main disadvantage is in not having the ability to set a maximum content width. I find that 40-45 em is my preferred width in general. Among fbreader's frustrations: I cannot define a stylesheet, though I can apply a selected set of styles (defining margin widths, e.g., but not the _text_ width, which is frustrating). The book I've presently got loaded is either right or center justified -- the left margin is ragged, again, frustrating. And text doesn't advance on a , like virtually any other Linux pager.
If calibre readily supported alternative clients, I'd be a lot happier with it.
⚫ The ability to include / reference / convert Web content would be somewhere north of awesome. There's still a large amount of information online that I reference, but would prefer to archive or cache locally, and/or convert to more useful formats (usually ePub or PDF).
⚫ Optimizing viewing experiences for wide-format, vertically-challenged screens would be hugely useful. 16:9 display ratios mean vertical space is at an absolute premium. Most PDF viewers are utterly brain-dead in this regard (evince, for example, requires four manual repositionings to view a typical 2-up document). The Internet Archive's BookReader does an excellent job of consider positioning content and paging through it as two separate functions. I strongly recommend taking some UI notes from it. https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader
Alternatively, the old 'gv' ghostscript Postscript and PDF reader will page through documents in a highly sensible fashion: top-bottom, left-right. Why this was achieved in 1992 while PDF readers of the subsequent 22 years have utterly blundered in this regard escapes me.
That said, I'm looking forward to this showing up in Debian's repos (I've got v1.25 presently).
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Notes:
1. http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_b...