Kitabu, from Sixty Four, LLC, is a simple, no frills EPUB reader for OS X. It has some basic but well chosen features, it’s fairly solid and, best of all, free.
For serious e-book collectors, it may be desirable to have a full-featured e-book reader like Calibre or BookReader. However, others may simply have a need to occasionally inspect an EPUB document, and a free one hits the spot. That’s what Kitabu is.
Developed in Estonia, by Sixty Four, LLC, Kitabu is just part of their EPUB technology offerings, and a free EPUB reader is a good way to introduce customers to their products. For example, there is an ePUB Metadata editor (US$3.99) and an EPUB Packager ($0.99).
Showing the TOC sidebar, position slider and sepia background
Features:
Kitabu has a short but pleasing list of features:
- Font size adjustment
- Background color adjustment (3)
- Lion Full Screen mode
- Control of number of columns (1,2,3)
- Copy or move document into the library
- Finder inspection of the library
- Slider and percentage indicator for position in e-book
- TOC sidebar
- Can open HTML links
- Supports embedded media files, audio & video
Simple display options
Negatives:
- Can only view one document at a time
- Limited font selection (Times New Roman, Helvetica, Georgia, Arial)
- No search
- No bookmarks
- No change of font color
- No gesture support
- Only reads EPUB format
The app claims drag and drop support. Not knowing for sure what that meant, I dragged an EPUB document into the library (using Lion 10.7.3) and the app promptly crashed. Even if I didn’t take the meaning of “drag and drop” correctly, that bug needs fixing.
Three column mode
All things considered, for a free app that doesn’t aspire to go toe to toe with the major apps like Bookle, BookReader, Calibre, and Murasaki, it’s a convenient, small (0.8 MB), and stable during reading of docs that gets the job done nicely. (See TMO’s Guide to Writring, Publishing & E-books for more on those apps.)
Do I Recommemd it?
I do. The app is modest in its ambitions yet does the job nicely. I found it to be stable, except for the bug noted above, and fast. For that, it gets a Solid rating. It has room to grow if the developer sees fit. It has some essential features, and implements those gracefully. This is a good app to have around if you’re not into collecting e-books on your Mac, but occasionally need to inspect an EPUB document.
Kitabu 1.0.1 requires OS X 10.6 or later. It’s free.
A modest library of EPUBs