I didn't start my desktop readers review with Thorium Reader for nothing — EDRLab is constantly developing the application for Windows, Mac and even Linux, and now the next version has been released.
Thorium was able to display books in EPUB format of any complexity before, but in the new release the developers paid attention to UI/UX: they improved management of their book collection, search by text, navigation, bookmarking, as well as added themes for the application interface and 8 backgrounds to the reader. Books in your library can now be tagged and filtered by tag, author, date and format. The latter is important because Thorium supports not only EPUB2 and EPUB3 with floating layouts and EPUB3 with fixed layout, but also PDF files. And not just supports, but also shows in the catalogue in which format the book is presented.
Thorium Reader can read any book aloud, whether it is included in EPUB by the publisher or not, and this feature is also being slowly developed, making it easier to control synthesiser reading or playback of synchronised text and audio. For foreign language learners, this auto-reading feature can be useful: Thorium highlights the words it pronounces and highlights the paragraph of text you're in. “Book Karaoke” — what do you think of the name for the feature?
Access to online catalogues in OPDS format is new for Thorium, but some other readers can work with it too. In a nutshell: anyone can give you their book catalogue directly into the reader, you just need to get a link to their OPDS-feed. Project Gutenberg, for example, is among those who give it away.
It is possible to criticise Thorium Reader 3.0 too. In terms of design and usability, the reader is still very much inferior to the desktop version of Apple Books, so it's unlikely to be able to compete on Mac yet. Also during a quick test I had some questions about the correctness of displaying CSS styles. And the stability of work should also be improved: during auto-reading the application may hang.
But in general, the development of such a universal and free reader for desktop and laptops is to be welcomed. You can install the new version of Thorium Reader by clicking here.
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