As a user, I choose textmode. I use a text-only browser as an HTML reader, works great for EPUB. No graphical fonts, no Javascript, no CSS, no color. Often I will save to .txt so I can read with less(1).
I have done the same, very probably with the same browser you're using (links). Just curious, do you handle images (or graphs) in EPUB files in some specific way?
Mostly, ebooks are perfectly fine to use without images, but not 100% of the time.
Below is a quick and dirty script I use to make a single HTML file from an EPUB file. It outputs a _script_ that when run will output the HTML files in the EPUB as a single file to stdout. It is not perfect, e.g., sometimes the order of the HTML files may need to be adjusted, but I rarely bother. I open the HTML file in links and optionally save as .txt. I don't care for UTF-8 or other non-ASCII characters.
EPUB to single HTML file.
#!/bin/sh
test ${#1} -ge 1||exec echo usage: $0 1.epub;
printf "(\n"
for x in ${1-*.epub};do
echo printf \'\\n\\n,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, "$x" ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,\\n\\n\'
7z l $x|sed -n "s/.* /7z x -so $x /;/nav.xhtml/d;/[tx]ml$/p"|sort -n
done
echo ")|tr -cd '[\\\12\40-\176]'"
Yeah, I had a similar script of my own, utilizing the fact that EPUBs are essentially zip files. Thanks for sharing yours. I'm a great fan of your scripts for text-only browsing etc.
As a user, I choose textmode. I use a text-only browser as an HTML reader, works great for EPUB. No graphical fonts, no Javascript, no CSS, no color. Often I will save to .txt so I can read with less(1).