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I don't normally comment on HN, but this topic is something I've got a strong opinion on.

I use Foliate to read epub's, but I've got one massive peeve with ALL e-readers. I'd really, really like for an option that tells the e-reader not to modify my epub. I don't use annotations, I really don't need the e-reader to bookmark where I've stopped reading.

Just don't write over my epub!

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Hmm, I mostly use Calibre for epub reading, and was not aware of it writes bookmark back to epub itself. Do you mean some e-ink reader updates .epub whenever you add bookmark? That seems an odd implementation.

I'm not sure what gets modified, but I've stopped using the Calibre epub-reader because I found that everytime I've read a book, my rsync backup script found changes in the epub. I once checked in the epub (it's a zipfile after all) and there seems to be an extra file added. Removing that solves the issue. It was a long time ago, I can't remember details.

Now I just copy my epub's to a temporary file before reading.

FWIW, there is a setting to make Calibre's reader to save its bookmarks file outside the epub. I think the setting needed to be set in the reader itself.

If you chmod the epub file to read‐only, does the program lose the ability to annotate or save your place?

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