Koreader

This is a document viewer application, created for usage on the Kindle e-ink reader. It currently supports Kindle 5 (Touch) and Kindle Paperwhite. The devices need to be jailbroken in order to install the application. Also, a kind of external launcher is needed.

Koreader started as the KindlePDFViewer application, but it supports much more formats than PDF now. Among them are DJVU, FB2, EPUB, TXT, CBZ, HTML.

Koreader is a frontend written in Lua and uses the API presented by the Koreader-base framework. Koreader implements a GUI and is currently targeted at Touch-based devices - for the classic user interface for button-driven e-ink devices (like the Kindle 2, Kindle DX, Kindle 3, Kindle 4) see the KindlePDFviewer legacy project or - especially for the Kindle 4 - have a look at its fork Librerator.

The application is licensed under the GPLv3 (see COPYING file).

Building

Follow these steps:

• fetch thirdparty sources

  • manually fetch all the thirdparty sources:

    • init and update submodule koreader-base
    • within koreader-base:
      • install muPDF sources into subfolder "mupdf"
      • install muPDF third-party sources (see muPDF homepage) into a new subfolder "mupdf/thirdparty"
      • install libDjvuLibre sources into subfolder "djvulibre"
      • install CREngine sources into subfolder "kpvcrlib/crengine"
      • install LuaJit sources into subfolder "luajit-2.0"
      • install popen_noshell sources into subfolder "popen-noshell"
      • install libk2pdfopt sources into subfolder "libk2pdfopt"

  • automatically fetch thirdparty sources with Makefile:

    • make sure you have patch, wget, unzip, git and svn installed
    • run make fetchthirdparty.

• adapt Makefile to your needs - have a look at Makefile.defs in koreader-base

• run make thirdparty. This will build MuPDF (plus the libraries it depends on), libDjvuLibre, CREngine, libk2pdfopt and Lua.

• run make. This will build the koreader application

Running

The user interface is scripted in Lua. See "reader.lua". It uses the Linux feature to run scripts by using a corresponding line at its start.

So you might just call that script. Note that the script and the koreader-base binary currently must be in the same directory.

You would then just call reader.lua, giving the document file path, or any directory path, as its first argument. Run reader.lua without arguments to see usage notes. The reader.lua script can also show a file chooser: it will do this when you call it with a directory (instead of a file) as first argument.