This is a document viewer application, originally created for usage on the Kindle e-ink reader. It currently supports Kindle 5 (Touch), Kindle Paperwhite and Kobo devices. Kindles 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.
This application is distributed under the GNU AGPL v3 license (read the COPYING file).
Instructions about how to get and compile the source are intended for a *nix OS. Windows users are suggested to develop in a Linux VM or use andLinux, Wubi.
To get and compile the source you must have patch, wget, unzip, git, autoconf
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
Cross toolchains are available to 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
You might also need SDL library packages if you want to compile and run
Koreader on PC. Fedora users can install SDL and SDL-devel.
Ubuntu users probably have to run:
sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev
git clone https://github.com/koreader/koreader.git
cd koreader
make fetchthirdparty
If you already done an emulator build, you must do:
make clean
To build for the Kindle:
make customupdate
To build for the Kobo:
make TARGET_DEVICE=KOBO 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.
If you already done a real device build, you must do:
make clean
To build:
EMULATE_READER=1 make
To run:
cd koreader-*/koreader && ./reader.lua -d ./
To test:
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:
EMULATE_READER=1 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.
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
- after using ccache, make a clean build will only take 15sec. Enjoy!
- to disable ccache, use
export USE_NO_CCACHE=1before make. - for more detail about ccache. visit: