What this is
------------

This is a plugin for Mozilla/Firefox that will allow reading of epub
formatted ebooks. epub is a modern, open standard based on XML/XHTML.
Often known as Adobe ebook format, it has been adopted by a number
of free and commercial ebook vendors. For more information, see the
official site http://www.idpf.org.

How it works
------------

After installation you can read epub books online or locally.
Use your browser to load a URL pointing to an epub document. For example,
http://www.epubbooks.com/book/102/verne-20000-leagues-under-the-sea.epub
You may be prompted for an application to read the document. If so,
choose e.g. /usr/bin/firefox. The browser should then open a page of
contents and you can read any chapter from there.

This plugin creates a directory .epub in your home directory. Any
downloaded books are stored in this directory. e.g. the above file
is stored as ~/.pub/verne-20000-leagues-under-the-sea.epub. It is also
unpacked into the directory ~/.pub/verne-20000-leagues-under-the-sea.
(This inefficiency in storage may be addressed in a later version.).
If you leave the document, these files and directories will be kept.

You can revisit a downloaded epub document by using a file scheme e.g. 
file:///home/user/.pub/verne-20000-leagues-under-the-sea/content-wrapper.xml
The file content-wrapper.xml is added to every saved ebook and allows
you to access the contents directly from the local copy.

Install
-------

- Unpack the distribution

    tar zxf epub-0.1.tgz

- Change to the unpacked directory and run as yourself (not root)

  ./configure
  make
  make install-plugin

- Restart firefox

- If you load local URLS file:///... you may need to add this line
  to /etc/mime.types:

    application/epub+zip epub

  This MIME type has been applied for to IANA and is used by epub 
  publishers, but may not be in the mime.types file yet.