FREE ePub Quicklook and Spotlight Plugins for Mac OS X

When you have a lot of ePub books, it can be useful to see excerpt and meta data information in quicklook. Even more important could be to search in this data. If you are looking for this functionality, you have just found it.

TL;DR;

Do you want to have ePub excerpt and meta data information in Quicklook? Do you want to search in this data with Spotlight? You can build and install it yourself flowing this tutorial for free.

Tutorial

1. Download epub.mdimporter, epub.qlgenerator from github.com
2. Copy the unzipped epub.qlgenerator file into ~/Library/QuickLook (QuickLook feature)
3. Copy the unzipped epub.mdimporter file into /Library/Spotlight (Spotlight feature)
4. run qlmanage -r command from terminal to make Mac notice the plugin appearing and start using it automatically
5. run mdimport -r /Library/Spotlight/epub.mdimporter command from terminal to make it index your .epub files

Note

Spotlight will begin indexing your EPUB files in the background.

When used on DRM protected files (Adobe, iBooks, Kobo, Barnes & Noble), metadata will only be read from the unencrypted part of the EPUB. Typically this means no cover image will be shown. Spotlight is also unable to index the text in DRM protected files, though it can still search the metadata in DRM protected files.

References

• [1] https://github.com/jaketmp/ePub-quicklook