KOReader is a document viewer application, originally created for Kindle e-ink readers. It currently runs on Kindle 5 (Touch), Kindle Paperwhite, Kobo, Android(2.3+) devices.

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.

This application is distributed under the GNU AGPL v3 license (read the COPYING file).

Check out the KOReader wiki to learn more about this project.

Instructions about how to get and compile the source are intended for a linux OS. Windows users are suggested to develop in a Linux VM or use Wubi.

To get and compile the source you must have patch, wget, unzip, git, autoconf, subversion and cmake installed. Version of autoconf need to be greater than 2.64.

Ubuntu users may need to run:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libtool

Cross compile toolchains are available for Ubuntu users through these commands:

# for Kindle
sudo apt-get install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi g++-arm-linux-gnueabi
# for Kobo
sudo apt-get install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf g++-arm-linux-gnueabihf
# for Win32
sudo apt-get install gcc-mingw-w64-i686 g++-mingw-w64-i686 

A recent version of Android SDK/NDK and ant are needed in order to build Koreader for Android devices.

sudo apt-get install ant

You might also need SDL library packages if you want to compile and run Koreader on your Linux PC. Fedora users can install SDL and SDL-devel. Ubuntu users probably need to run:

sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev

git clone https://github.com/koreader/koreader.git
cd koreader
make fetchthirdparty

To build installable package for Kindle:

make TARGET=kindle clean kindleupdate

To build installable package for Kobo:

make TARGET=kobo clean koboupdate

To run, you must call the script reader.lua. Run it without arguments to see usage notes. Note that the script and the koreader-base binary currently must be in the same directory.

You may checkout our nightlybuild script to see how to build a package from scratch.

Make sure the "android" and "ndk-build" tools are in your PATH variable and the NDK variable points to the root directory of the Android NDK.

First, run this command to make a standalone android cross compiling toolchain from NDK:

make android-toolchain

Then, build installable package for Android:

make TARGET=android clean androidupdate

To build an emulator on current Linux machine just run:

make clean && make

If you want to compile the emulator for Windows you need to run:

make TARGET=win32 clean && make TARGET=win32

To run koreader on your developing machine (you may need to change $(MACHINE) to the arch of your machine such as 'x86_64'):

cd koreader-$(MACHINE)/koreader && ./reader.lua -d ../../test

To run unit tests in Koreader just issue:

make test

You may need to checkout the travis config file to setup up a proper testing environment. Briefly, you need to install luarocks and then install busted with luarocks. The "eng" language data file for tesseract-ocr is also need to test OCR functionality. Finally, make sure that luajit in your system is at least of version 2.0.2.

You can also specify size of emulator's screen via environment variables. For more information, please refer to koreader-base's README.

To use your own koreader-base repo instead of the default one change KOR_BASE environment variable:

make KOR_BASE=../koreader-base

This will be handy if you are developing koreader-base and want to test your modifications with kroeader frontend. NOTE: only support relative path for now.

Please refer to l10n's README to grab the latest translations from the Koreader project on Transifex with this command:

make po

If your language is not listed on the Transifex project, please don't hesitate to send a language request here.

Ccache can speed up recompilation by caching previous compilations and detecting when the same compilation is being done again. In other words, it will decrease build time when the source have been built. Ccache support has been added to KOReader's build system. Before using it, you need to install a ccache in your system.

• in Ubuntu use:sudo apt-get install ccache
• in Fedora use:sudo yum install ccache
• install from source:
  • get latest ccache source from http://ccache.samba.org/download.html
  • unarchieve the source package in a directory
  • cd to that directory and use:./configure && make && sudo make install
• to disable ccache, use export USE_NO_CCACHE=1 before make.
• for more detail about ccache. visit:

http://ccache.samba.org