KDE ePub Thumbnailer For Linux

KDE ePub Thumbnailer is an open source and freely distributed desktop application designed especially for the KDE graphical desktop environment as a thumbnail generator for the ePub file format used by many digital book publishers to distribute electronic books (popularly known as e-books).

The project has been engineered to use the libepub library from the ebook-tools project to try to extract the covers from ePub files, which have been downloaded somewhere on your computer prior to using the software or after.

While not quite perfect, as it can’t generate thumbnails from all ePub documents because of various reasons, such as if the ePub file doesn’t contain a cover or it is simply not supported, KDE ePub Thumbnailer integrates well with the Dolphin file manager.

To use it, download the latest version from Softpedia, save it somewhere on your filesystem, extract the archive, open a terminal emulator and navigate to the location of the extracted archive files with the ‘cd’ command.

Use the ‘cmake .’ command to configure the program, then you will be able to execute the ‘make’ install command to compile it. Lastly, run the ‘make install’ command as root or with sudo to install the software system wide.

Now, the KDE ePub Thumbnailer add-on will be available to all users. so simply open the Dolphin file manager of your KDE desktop environment, go to "Configure Dolphin -> General -> Previews" and select "ePub documents") to activate the plugin.

Open a folder where you have at least one ePub file and see if it works. In case it can’t see thumbnails of your ePub files, restart your session by logging out and log back in. If this does not work either, it means that the ePub file doesn’t have a cover or it is not supported.