Intro

I finally arranged my employer to purchase Mastering Emacs¹, which provided it in pdf and epub. PDF² has long since been my standard thanks to being able to view it nicely on all my devices, but I thought I would give epub a try, too. It’s major feature sounds like both emacs-window text resizing, and page memory so it keeps track of where you’ve read. It turns out that the lauded epub mode has some extra steps with the installation. I use straight use-package³, and here was the invocation.

use-package esxml

An XML package, still on Github. I guess epub, like docx, is heavily xml-based. https://github.com/tali713/esxml

(use-package esxml
 :straight (esxml :type git :host nil :repo "https://github.com/tali713/esxml.git"))

use-package nov.el

https://depp.brause.cc/nov.el/ . Known as the best (or only) epub reading package, no longer maintained on github. Straight has an easy syntax for non-github git repositories.

(use-package nov
 :after esxml
 :straight (nov :type git :host nil :repo "https://depp.brause.cc/nov.el.git"))

Footnotes

¹ Purchase as well as sizable excepts are available at https://www.masteringemacs.org/. While most or all of the book is available online for free, I wanted to support the author with a purchase.

² emacs can handle pdfs out of the box with recent versions, but it has an absolutely excellent (and much faster) pdf-tools mode at https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools.

³ The straight package manager, using the use-package extension, makes package management reproducible and simple. https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el#integration-with-use-package