How to search the text of an EPUB book

Short answer: open the book in a reader with full-text search and press Ctrl+F (⌘+F on a Mac). Quire EPUB Reader in Chrome, calibre’s viewer, Thorium and Apple Books all search the whole book, not just the page in front of you.

Chrome’s own Find can’t help, because Chrome doesn’t open EPUB files: it downloads them.

Updated 15 October 2026. Quire search checked in Chrome for Testing 153 on a Mac; calibre and Apple Books steps follow their manuals.

Search a whole EPUB in Chrome

These steps use Quire EPUB Reader, which we make.

Open the book in Quire EPUB Reader
Install Quire EPUB Reader, then click an .epub link, or open the library from the toolbar icon and drop the file there.
Start a search
Press Ctrl+F (⌘+F on a Mac) or /. If you select a word on the page first, it becomes the search text.
Type and press Enter
Quire searches every chapter. Results are grouped by chapter with a short excerpt each, a counter shows “Result 1 of …”, and matches are highlighted on the page.
Step through the results
Press Enter for the next match and Shift+Enter for the previous one, or click any excerpt to jump there.
Narrow it down
Tick Match case for names, or Whole words so that “whale” doesn’t also match “whalemen”.

Searching Moby-Dick for “white whale” in Quire EPUB Reader, with results grouped by chapter — Searching Moby-Dick for a phrase. Each chapter with matches is listed with its excerpts.

How fast is it? On our test Mac, searching all of Moby-Dick (about 208,000 words) took about a second. A slower computer will take longer. A search for the single word “whale” found 1,586 matches, which is why the whole-word and match-case options are worth knowing. Searching works offline too, because the book is stored in your browser.

Search in calibre’s e-book viewer

calibre is a free desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux. Its manual describes its viewer’s search as “very powerful”.

Open the book in calibre’s viewer.
Press Ctrl+F, ⌘+F or /.
Choose a mode: Contains, Whole words, Nearby words or Regex (regular expressions, for patterns such as every year in the 1800s).
Press Enter or F3 for the next match, and Shift+F3 or Shift+Enter for the previous one.

“Nearby words” finds words that appear close together, which helps when you remember roughly what a passage said but not its exact wording.

Search in Apple Books on a Mac

Move the pointer to the top of the book, click the Search button and type a word, phrase or page number. You can also select text, right-click it and choose Search.

Search in Thorium Reader

EDRLab lists “full-text search inside a publication” among the features of Thorium, its free reader for Windows, macOS and Linux.

Tips for better results

Search for an unusual word or a short, distinctive phrase rather than a common word.
If you get nothing, try fewer words. A phrase can fail to match because of punctuation, such as a curly apostrophe in the book and a straight one in your search.
A scanned book saved as an EPUB may contain pictures of pages rather than text. Then there is nothing for any reader to search.

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