When comparing Cool Reader vs Foliate, the Slant community recommends Foliate for most people. In the question“What are the best eBook readers for UNIX-like systems?” Foliate is ranked 2nd while Cool Reader is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Foliate is:
Important for example for IT books (source code) or other reference books.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free and open source
Cool Reader is available completely free and is also open source.
Pro Fully customizable
Pro A wide range of formats supported
Cool Reader supports epub (non-DRM), fb2, doc, txt, rtf, html, chm, tcr, pdb, prc, mobi (non-DRM) and pml formats.
Pro Supports coloured text
Important for example for IT books (source code) or other reference books.
Pro Minimal reading UI
When reading, there is only a customizable progress indicator at the bottom, and the title at the top.
Cons
Con Constantly changes brightness
Con Could have a better UI design
Con Does not support DRM .epubs
.epubs with DRM are not supported by Cool Reader.
Con No PDF support
Foliate cannot be used to read PDFs, which may be a problem for those who read many documents in this format.