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Dropbox Quietly Launches an Epub Viewer

Dropbox is a popular way to store your ebooks and other files online, and now they have made it a little easier to read those ebooks.

A reader has tipped me to the news that Dropbox now has an Epub viewer built into its website. Simply double click on one of the Epub files you have uploaded to your Dropbox account and it will open in a viewer – just like PDF and Word.

My source and I were unable to find an announcement from DropBox, but I can confirm it works – just not very well.

The Dropbox Epub viewer ignores the formatting, table of contents, and all of the metadata. All it can really do is take the text and images from an Epub file and show it as a single column of centered text, making it a viewer app of last resort.

My source calls it "a pretty cool improvement" but I am going to let Dropbox add features like basic support for formatting before I get excited.

Thanks, Stephanie, for the tip!

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Comments


Felix May 2, 2018 um 12:53 am

Yeah, it doesn’t even show the cover art unless it’s embedded into the book’s first page. But it’s a start. The web needs more of this.

Nate Hoffelder May 2, 2018 um 5:46 am

ah, so that is why I saw the cover on some books but not others


Randy Lea May 2, 2018 um 2:38 pm

I looked at 2 EPUBs. The first was center justified. Bad. The 2nd is full justified, shows chapter titles in bold, pics look OK. The text adjust to the display width. The entire book is displayed as one very long web page. There is a comments/activity column on the right, which can be reduced in size, but not eliminated as far as I can tell.

For grins, I tried another ebook format, got a message that the previewer didn’t work on that filetype.

I think this is a file previewer, and is fine for that. I could read a fiction book here if I really wanted to, but have no reason for that. There are good options for even Fire Tablets for reading EPUBs.


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