SumatraPDF reads EPUB books too: open one and find your place

You can read an unencrypted EPUB on Windows with SumatraPDF and use its contents and search controls to find a passage. There’s no need to convert the book to PDF first. The official download page offers a Windows installer and portable ZIP for stable version 3.6.1.

Open an EPUB and jump to a section

In SumatraPDF, press Ctrl+O and choose your EPUB. To try the controls with a known example, save the original practice EPUB and open it the same way.

Press F12 to show the book’s contents or bookmarks. The practice book has three titled sections: “Opening,” “On the balcony,” and “Back indoors.” Choose On the balcony to find the brass telescope and a blue notebook. Alt+Left takes you back after following a contents link.

Find a phrase

Press Ctrl+F and search for brass telescope. The phrase appears twice in the practice book: once in “Opening” and once in “On the balcony.” Press F3 for the next match or Shift+F3 for the previous one. You can also press Ctrl+B to add the current page as a favorite; that favorite is separate from the book’s chapter contents.

SumatraPDF uses an EPUB reflow engine, so a chapter title and phrase make useful ways to describe your place without relying on a page number. Its documentation also describes a “Change eBook Settings” dialog and per-document settings, but labels those features version 3.7+. Don’t expect them in the stable 3.6.1 download.

SumatraPDF’s supported formats specify unencrypted EPUB. A .epub extension alone does not establish that a book is unencrypted; use the provider’s supported reading app for an encrypted library book.

Source note: The official keyboard shortcuts and eBook UI documentation describe the controls above. PyMuPDF 1.28.2 loaded and rendered the practice EPUB and confirmed its three contents entries and two phrase matches; SumatraPDF’s interface was not independently tested.