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go buy an android tablet and install FBreader https://fbreader.org/ FREE FOSS

I use FBReader http://www.fbreader.org/ to read ebooks on my computer. Among many other good things (including the price: free) it has a setting to force an ebook to use the font(s) that you choose.

I use my N800 daily, too ... to play Klondike. The FBReader software is a terrible user interface. A pity, really.

I dislike the interface as well, but once you get a book open and in landscape mode the reading experience is rather nice. (I prefer the program's own scrolling from the settings instead of the scroll bar. Much prettier. I think I also decreased the font size a bit.) Adding books is not nice whatever you do.

After getting hooked on palm eReader on my old palm device, once that became obsolete I looked around at alternatives, long story short I now use FBReader on my laptop it's open source and supports the open .epub ebook format and pretty much all others, if i can't find a ebook in the format it supports there are many tools around for converting to .epub or another supported format link - http://www.fbreader.org/

I use my N800 daily, too ... to play Klondike. The FBReader software is a terrible user interface. A pity, really.

So I've tried to use my laptop. I've tried installing Amazon's Kindle for PC under Wine. It installs but won't run, so I don't know if it's suitable for reading or not.

Calibre seems intended for downloading and feeding data to devices like the Sony reader.

All in all, the laptop doesn't seem to be a good candidate for curling up with a book. If I perch it on my stomach it has a habit of spontaneously loading up Hulu and rotting my brain.

Also, Blio on PC, Mac, iPhone and iPod touch, but no Linux? WTF?

All you need from a good and fast e-book reader on Windows and Linux is FBReader, anyway. Open source, lightning fast, lightweight UI - what else do you want?

Combine with large-point FreeSerif on high-DPI screens to get nice "PDF-like" font smoothing, and you're all set.

Use something like pdf2txt or pdftohtml to convert the file to something that isn't a PDF file.

Load the resulting file into OpenOffice, set the margins and page size to whatever fits the screen size of your device the best.

Create a new PDF.

Or just use a book-reading program like fbreader that works directly with html files. (You can use OpenOffice to create a html file from a txt file, too.)

What's the advantage of epub over a simple html file?

I read books with http://www.fbreader.org/ and it supports both epub and html (and other formats too).

Most of my books are html files so I get boldface chapter headings and whatnot (prettier than a txt file). What does epub add that I don't get with html?

I use my n810 as an eBook reader all the time. The screen works quite well, and FBreader works like a champ (Even has its own Maemo repository). It doesn't have a book repository, but I haven't need one. The n800 should work about the same, and has a slightly larger screen. I just needed the keyboard.

But then again, I've been using eReaders since my original Palm Pro.

However, I can't find any free software that can specifically work with epub.

There are at least two. Adobe Digital Editions which is reputed to be a pretty thorough implementation of the .epub standard by a lot of people who wrote .epub creation tutorials, though I haven't tried it myself. And FBReader which is an open source multi platform program that is well suited for portable devices like the Illiad, smartphones, Nokia Internet tablets (770, 800, 810 tc.), and android, but also runs in Windows, and Linux. Its implementation is not perfect, but the books look just fine and will pull the author & title information from the .epub for you so you don't have to do it manually when adding the book to your library.

Personally, I use FBReader on my N810. I have it configured to look roughly like this (red on black preserves night vision and doesn't leave nearly the afterimage that black on white or white on black does when reading in bed at night) though there's no toolbar in fullscreen mode. Here are some screenshots on other platforms.

The benefits are its an open standard and you can fairly easily create your own .epub books that follow the standard.

However, I can't find any free software that can specifically work with epub.

There are at least two. Adobe Digital Editions which is reputed to be a pretty thorough implementation of the .epub standard by a lot of people who wrote .epub creation tutorials, though I haven't tried it myself. And FBReader which is an open source multi platform program that is well suited for portable devices like the Illiad, smartphones, Nokia Internet tablets (770, 800, 810 tc.), and android, but also runs in Windows, and Linux. Its implementation is not perfect, but the books look just fine and will pull the author & title information from the .epub for you so you don't have to do it manually when adding the book to your library.

Personally, I use FBReader on my N810. I have it configured to look roughly like this (red on black preserves night vision and doesn't leave nearly the afterimage that black on white or white on black does when reading in bed at night) though there's no toolbar in fullscreen mode. Here are some screenshots on other platforms.

The benefits are its an open standard and you can fairly easily create your own .epub books that follow the standard.

http://www.fbreader.org/

I use fbreader to read books on my Fedora 10 netbook (Acer Aspire One) and my desktop computers. It's a wonderful program that does exactly what an ebook reader should do, and no more than that. The interface stays out of your way.

For Fedora, you can install it with "yum install fbreader" -- not sure how other Linux distributions handle it but it's probably in most repositories.

You somehow forgot to mention that it requires a freaking booklight to read in the dark.

The most absurd facet of the thing if you ask me.

I still prefer my Nokia N810 device with software ebook reader FBReader. I can set the display to red text on a black background and reap the following benefits:

• I can read in the dark
• I can read in the dark in bed without keeping my girlfriend awake.
• I can read in the dark without hosing my night vision due to the red text.*

For a $360 device that uses electronic paper I'm flabbergasted that you still need to buy a freaking book light for it.

*Note: Prior to learning to use red on black (still using white on black text) I noticed that after I turned the reader off and laid down to sleep that I could still see an afterimage of a bunch of little lines organized in a rectangle with my eyes closed. This problem evaporated with red on black.

A couple of points..

I apparently don't count as a person since I vastly prefer ebooks. However, I prefer them via FBReader on my Nokia N810, not Amazon's kindle. And, since you can't even purchase an amazon ebook without having a kindle registered to your Amazon account (among other restrictions), their offering does absolutely nothing for me and has cost them several sales already.

That said, I've always had good experiences ordering books from Aamzon, but abysmal experiences with a camera purchase, which wasn't surprising given how notoriously hard to reach their customer service number has been historically, though they apparently have made improvements.

I keep my ebook collection as (mostly) either html or txt files, all run though bzip2 to save the space. So I have, lets say, MobyDick.htm.bz2 and LostCity.txt.bz2.
 
I used to convert them as needed to pdf files by loading the text or html into OpenOffice (or in the case of html loading it into Firefox and then cut-and-paste into OpenOffice) and then use either OO's built-in "export to PDF" function or the cups-pdf driver to create a PDF file that I could read with Acrobat Reader. (You get to choose your margins, page size, font and text size by doing it this way, so I could make the PDF file into something that's comfortable for me to read.)
 
However, I recently purchased an Acer Aspire One and have found an even better solution. http://www.fbreader.org/
 
FBReader will read txt and html files directly from my bz2 files, and it allows you to set the margins, font and size just as you wish too. I now use the wireless networking on the Acer to run FBReader remotely from anywhere around my home and office, with a "ssh desktopcomputer FBReader" command to run FBReader on my desktop computer and view it on my Acer. This way FBReader on my desktop computer continues to have all of my books up-to-date (meaning that it remembers where I left off in each one) and I can still sit back in my easy chair with my Acer and read books. If I want to take it into the big world outside, I can also keep a copy of my books locally on the Acer and run FBReader locally there.
 
FBReader works much better on the Acer Aspire One than simply reading PDF's due to the Aspire One's small screen size.

I'm not sure what kinds of eBooks the OP plans on reading, but using the Linux-based Nokia N800 or N810 internet tablets as eBook readers using FBReader is pretty popular. You can use the tablet for lots of other cool stuff too. You won't be able to read DRM'd stuff though.