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Originally Posted by Mycroft88
Fabulous update. I was a bit frustrated with how slow the reader opened books, but since there wasn't anything better, I made do. But now, WOW! This is fantastic!
Just found your Patreon and joined up. Thank you so much Kovid!
Maybe for your next trick, you can make it so I can open up epub graphic novels without having to create a CBZ file? :-)
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Thorium Reader does a good job with them (and critically, handles spreads properly). It will import a copy of the ePub, and leave calibre's untouched.
At least if you do not change calibre's copy, opening it from calibre more than once will not result in multiple copies of the same book, but not sure if this just matches metadata and replaces whatever it had before, or if it will treat any binary difference as a new book (I think the latter).
You can also add calibre server OPDS endpoint to add things that way.
You can add Thorium as an Open With... option (in calibre context menu when you right-click EPUB) when you want to use it instead of calibre's viewer.
I think that Thorium (like Apple Books) unpacks the book when importing it, storing so no decompression is needed to open it for each reading session. Even though calibre is faster than it was, Thorium seems a little faster on first open, and opens fixed-layout very fast as well (not as fast as CBZ viewer can open but pretty close, noting that fixed layout ePub can include text that gets rendered on top of page images).