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I recently bought a digital book, and it downloaded in ePub format. This was unexpected, I had figured on getting a PDF.

I haven't any software installed to handle ePub files. Is there Windows software available that I can use to read the book?

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Out of curiosity, where did you purchase this eBook? I had assumed that most places now offered the ability to download in several different formats. I'm also curious if your book came with DRM. (Just wondering how prevalent DRM still is. I noticed O'Reilly stopped using it. – irrational John Sep 2 '10 at 18:18
I bought the book from books.alistapart.com. It is HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith. The ePub was the only format included in the download, surprisingly. – Grant Palin Sep 2 '10 at 21:32
Hmmm. Looking at their web site my guess is they are a small(er) outfit and that's why they went with only 1 format. If the eBook does not have DRM then you can try converting it to another format if you wish such as PDF. Tools such as Calibre (mentioned below) will do this but there are also other conversion utilities out there. YMMV on whether or not you will find the result of a conversion useful. – irrational John Sep 5 '10 at 15:09

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7 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Adobe Digital Editions is the standard.

If it doesn't have DRM, you can use Calibre's built in viewer. Calibre is awesome open source software that organizes your ebook collection and converts between formats, and more!

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up vote 4 down vote

calibre is what i use - handles most common e book formats and hasn't given me any issues. It also acts as a library type application, converts and syncs with many devices.

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+1 for Calibre; the excellent e-book library manager/viewer/converter – Ian Boyd Jan 30 '12 at 3:47
up vote 2 down vote

There is a list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB

It also includes other Operating Systems, apart from Windows.

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up vote 1 down vote

Lexcycle's Stanza is a pretty good reader.

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up vote 1 down vote

I use Adobe Digital Editions. It is good and it supports quite a few e-book readers.

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up vote 1 down vote

This link may also help with converting ePub to pdf:

http://www.dvdvideosoftware.org/guide/how-to-convert-drm-protected-epub-to-pdf.html

Apologies for having to post twice it's due to the spam prevention rules.

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up vote 1 down vote

There's plenty of ePub readers out there. If you use Firefox, you can use that with the following extension: http://www.epubread.com/en/

Otherwise, here's a list of popular ePub readers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB#Software_reading_systems

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+1 for the Firefox-extension. – Natrium May 3 '12 at 8:12

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