How to read epubs April 2, 2026 on Theresa Schönhammer's blog

After years of not caring about fonts, I’ve recently set my system font to Atkinson Hyperlegible 1 and disabled remote fonts in uBlock.

While reading “Lieb und Teuer” by Ilan Stephani in zathura, I noticed the font being different.2 Since zathurarc(5) only lets me change command prompt font, I considered switching to another epub reader. But trying to install one of those would have taken ages due to their webengine dependencies and my dial-upesque internet connection.3

Then I remembered there are only two file types: txt and zip. Simply unzip book.epub -d book, then librewolf book/epub/text/.4 Now open a chapter and enjoy your system font! After finishing a chapter, go back and select the next.

Screenshot of two browser windows side by side. On the left a chapter select, on the right the first chapter of Alice in Wonderland

On Android, the stock file manager won’t let you unzip book.epub directly; you’ll have to rename it to book.zip first.5 I’ve set the default app for html and xhtml files to the browser that ships with LineageOS.

Two screenshots, one of Androids file browser listing chapters of Moby Dick, the other of an Android browser displaying the fourth chapter of Moby Dick

Unfortunately, changing the system font to Atkinson Hyperlegible is not possible on stock LineageOS. Guess that’s just another reason to improve telephony and hybernation support on mobile linux.

  1. After being inspired by ddevaults dotfiles. ↩︎

  2. It’s easy to tell because the q has a super distinctive shape. ↩︎

  3. I don’t pay for internet access. My sim card gives me 64 kbit/s down and 192 kbit/s up for free. ↩︎

  4. the folder you’re looking for might also be called OEBPS or OPS. ↩︎

  5. Or just use Termux. ↩︎