Hello!
Sorry if this is clearly stated somewhere - I haven’t been able to find an answer yet.
I just setup Ubooquity and I’m able to navigate to my comics folder via the Ubooquity connect in Panels but my books folder does not show up. It’s configured the same way as my comics directory - does Panels not currently support epub files from Ubooquity or at all?
Loving the app so far and premium was well worth the $7.
Cheers!
Tried adding the epub through iCloud and got a failed download. So I take it Panels doesn’t officially support that file type.
Hopefully this is on the roadmap for you guys - you’ve got a killer app and would be neat to be able to implement eBooks alongside comics.
ePub files are just another name for a .ZIP file. So you could try opening them up in WINZIP or WINRAR and putting the image files into a .CBZ file.
Appreciate the reply, James. I thought about doing that but I was originally hoping Panels supported ePubs.
I’ve opted to keep Panels + Ubooquity for my comic reading and using Books on macOS and iOS syncing over wifi.
Not the most convenient, but I’m not drilling through books where I need to have that much conveniency on importing.
Cheers,
I recently gave ePubs a look to see how could we give them support in Panels.
It’s not as simple as it might look.
An epub is designed to represent not only images but, obviously, text. The content of an epub is basically HTML. And it would require adding support for full HTML rendering.
We can’t simply extract the images inside the epub file because, depending on the publisher, images can lack the conversation texts. This is because the text is expected to be rendered in HTML.
This is how a page would look like if we ignore the HTML.
Given that ePub is not officially a comic but an e-book format, and rendering is not as simple as in PDFs, we’ve decided to lower the priority of this format support.
We might add ePub support in the future, but this is not something likely to happen in the short term. We hope you understand.
Hello, I was wondering if there was any update to this? I’m actually developing an OPDS compatible self-hosted server in my spare time and have hit the snag that my favorite reader doesn’t support epubs. The last message in the thread makes sense, just wanted to double check since a few years passed 
Hey @oromei
It has changed from
We might add ePub support in the future, but this is not something likely to happen in the short term.
to
“We will add ePub support in the future, and we are aiming to make it happen this year 2022.”
We can’t promise anything, and there’s still a lot to do. But we want to change how the reader renders the content. With the new approach we have in mind, we’ll be able to improve PDF compatibility and performance and unlock the possibility of supporting other formats. ePub is first on our list of new formats to support when that happens.
Awesme, thanks for the reply!
Hi! Any news on this? Now Komga has ePub support. I am trying it with Panels, I can download ePub files, but they don’t open 
I have just bought Panels, and it would be awesome to use it also for ePub. Thank you!
ePUB is on the roadmap, and we are working on it already.
We would like to release a beta version with ePUB support soon, but we are not happy with the performance just yet.
Our latest beta, 3.3.0, adds ePUB support. You can join here: Join the Panels - Comic Reader beta - TestFlight - Apple
I am going to paste @dani 's message from our Discord announcement:
This new beta comes with one of the oldest feature requests in Panels: ePUB comic support. First of all, I want to set expectations about how Panels deals with ePUB.
- Panels is not an e-book reader. Many features that you might expect from a standard e-book reader are not present in Panels.
- Our goal is to support comics edited as ePUB, not books. That means the readers will behave exactly the same as if it were a CBZ/CBR/…, the same way we do with PDF.
- You will be able to open an ePUB book in Panels. Yes. But the experience might not be the best. We recommend using a real e-book reader for books, not Panels.
- Changing the font size/color is out of Panels’ scope for supporting ePUB comics.
We are looking forward to getting your feedback. We have tested many comics bought on Humble (Books), but you might have ePUB comics that might render differently. Reach us out and share them with us by DM, and we will try to fix any rendering issues.
