An Opera ePub book reading widget is being developed

Not so long ago Liza Daly released Bookworm to the public, an ePub web application for reading .epub formatted eBooks.

Another alternative is now being developed by Opera Software for their popular web browser in the form of a widget. Jon Noring has been advising Haakon Lie over at Opera to develop the browser plug-in, which is currently at a beta stage of development.

Please note: to use the widget you will need to download a version of Opera with File I/O support from Opera Labs.

There are some basic instructions posted over on the Opera Widgets blog. In short these are;

• Add books by going to the library and clicking “Add book…”
• Read books by clicking “Read”
• Navigate a book using the keyboard
  • Scroll up: Shift-Space, Page up, Arrow up, Z
  • Scroll down: Space, Page down, Arrow down, X
  • Previous chapter: Arrow left
  • Next chapter: Arrow right
  • Chapter top: Home
  • Chapter bottom: End
  • Toggle TOC panel: F4, T
  • Toggle bookmark panel: B

For some reason you will need to rename your .epub file to the .zip extension. Hopefully this will be fixed soon.

There was no mention of any DRM capabilities so don’t expect any DRM protected books to work yet. There are however, a number of places where you can download free EPUB books. Please visit the epubBooks page on this site for a list of suitable websites.