Lithium EPUB Reader (Android) App Patches

[geek1011]

I thought I'd share my patches for the Lithium EPUB Reader in case anyone finds them useful. I made them for myself back in 2019, and open-sourced them earlier this year.

• Custom icon color.
• Custom cover aspect ratio.
• Optional cover-only grid view.
• Debuggable reader webview.
• Offline dictionary. (the original app doesn't even have one)
• Custom fonts. (I really like Equity btw)
• Smaller minimum font size.
• Additional information in the reader footer.
• Series metadata support.
• Series section in library drawer.
• Increased number of visible actions for the reader toolbar.
• Support for inverted portrait/landscape rotation.

Note that this does not unlock the Pro features; you still need to get that the normal way through Google Play.

I've repeatedly tried to get in touch with the app's creator to try and get some or all of these improvements included in the base app without success, unfortunately.

Source Code & Build Instructions

.

[geek1011]

I've recently added some features to this:

• Support for EPUB3-style series metadata.
• Support for deep lookups in the dictionary (i.e., you can tap a word in a definition to look it up.

[geek1011]

For testing, builds of the latest version can be found here.

These builds do not include sync support or additional custom fonts (you need to build it yourself for that), and pro features still require the pro version to be purchased from Google Play.

[geek1011]

Some more features:

• Full-bleed full-screen background on devices with a notch.
• More MD3-like design for library view.
• Larger book covers in grid view (they now expand to fill the remaining width).
• More built-in themes.
• More fonts.
• Option to enable hyphenation.
• Expanded display settings popup.
• Minor dictionary improvements.

[Quoth]

Can it do two pages side by side when tablet is in landscape? Unless I can't find the setting it's the only major omission on unpatched version.

[geek1011]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Can it do two pages side by side when tablet is in landscape?

No, it can't, but that should be possible. I've been looking at the pagination mechanism since I'm trying to fix the highlight bug (highlighting near the top/bottom of the page or over large margins causes unpredictable jumping and scrolling).

It shouldn't break anything if I make the resize logic halve the page width on a screen of a certain width, and since it does reflow during any size change, it shouldn't cause other issues.

only major omission on unpatched version

I found the lack of a dictionary, custom fonts, and series metadata to be pretty major lol... and the minimum font size on badly formatted books. Those were the only patches I did for the first few years.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by geek1011

I found the lack of a dictionary, custom fonts, and series metadata to be pretty major lol... and the minimum font size on badly formatted books. Those were the only patches I did for the first few years.

Yes, those are good additions.

However loads of Android epub apps not only don't have those but are essentially like reading on PalmOS, totally broken CSS and font support!

[geek1011]

Originally Posted by Quoth

However loads of Android epub apps not only don't have those but are essentially like reading on PalmOS, totally broken CSS and font support!

Yeah, I remember when I first found Lithium (when it had < 10K installs), I searched "epub" on Google Play and tried nearly every one of the ~40 apps in search of one with a decent interface and rendering.

The only other apps that were even close were Boox, Prestigio, and PocketBook. Moon+ is okay-ish, but it kind of just throws the kitchen sink at everything and doesn't do anything particularly well.

I liked Lithium at first sight, and when I started patching it, I liked it even more. It's very well-designed internally (unlike pretty much any other e-book app I've looked at apart from Libby), and since it's written in Java, it's much easier to patch to add major features than Kobo lol. Ever since then, I've been tweaking it until it's perfect...

The last big things on my TODO list are reworking pagination (for the highlight fix, for better FXL support, for faster chapter loads, for spreads on landscape, and better position saving especially while changing fonts), PDF support (using PDF.js), and some tweaks to make it work better with EPUB3 stuff.