One of the challenges I faced in Linux was that there did not appear to be an accessible application to read epub files. Yes, I could open epub etc but that defeats the purpose of the format. I wanted a generic reading solution.

That solution is ebook-speaker
The program goes beyond your regular DAISY book reader solutions. It can read a bewildering number of file formats and can even talk to hardware scanners and OCR to ensure that image files are covered.

The best part is that it is a console application hence very light in terms of resource usage which makes a difference on resource constrained devices like the raspberry pi 400 which is where I am running it.

I launched the program from the mate terminal and put orca to sleep while I read the book. If you do not want to do that, you can specify the -S option so that the phrase numbers are not read.

One of the biggest challenges with the program is installing it. I wanted to use it on a raspberry pi and there was no package for raspberry pi os. I had to build the program from source.
This is not as hard as it sounds. It takes some time, say about an hour because you need to install many dependencies both for compile time and runtime.
The dependencies are mentioned in the documentation. However, I have created a package which will allow you to install the application with a

sudo dpkg -i ebook-speaker_6.1-1_armhf.deb


The direct link to the package is below.
Download the ebook-speaker package for arm32 namely the raspberry pi

So what can’t you do with the program besides make your morning coffee?
Below markup navigation remains a challenge. The best way so far is to save a portion of the content to disk.

Another point with ebook-speaker is the developer.
Mr. Lemmens is a responsive developer and is quick to implement constructive suggestions.
Ebook-speaker is a superb solution for reading epub books as well as other books and must be tried first before moving to any other solution.