Paul linked to a positive Project Gutenberg review of Ibis Reader a few months ago, but it first came to my direct attention when I tried out Jolicloud and discovered what it was: a web-based EPUB reader. It was an interesting idea, I thought, but I wasn’t sure what it was really good for. But a couple of days ago, my perspective changed.
One of the great things about Baen Webscriptions and the Free Library is that they allow people who have access to Baen e-books to read them on-line as well as download them. Not too many other sites do that yet. Amazon is working on it with its “Kindle Web”, but doesn’t seem to be there yet. And there’s no equivalent for Nook, or a lot of other places that sell e-books. And lately I’ve been spending a lot of time in a place where I have web access but can’t use an e-book reader, and there are certain non-Baen e-books I’ve been wanting to read to pass the time there.
Enter Ibis Reader. Not only does it allow you to upload e-books to it from your hard drive, but it can also access ODPS catalogs—such as the ones you can make your Calibre catalog into with Calibre2odps and host on Dropbox. Which means I suddenly have access to any e-book I can convert into unencrypted EPUB form, from anywhere on the web.
via teleread.com