Downloadable Book

Sahas Subramanian and John Hunt


An epub edition of Ulysses with Annotations, an Index of Notes, and a Preface addressed primarily to first-time readers can be downloaded here, enabling offline reading of the annotated novel. Some features of the website, such as multimedia content, cross-linking of notes, variable pagination, and information about authorship and sources, are not available in the ebook. To learn more about the two platforms and the notes displayed on them, see the Preface. The first file below (in the blue hover-frame) features colored note numbers, also discussed in the Preface. If your reader cannot support the colors, the second link will download a monochrome version.

Color Monochrome

The ebook is updated every Sunday with new notes and revisions from the website.


The ebook uses recent features of the epub format which are not well supported by all readers. Based on what your reader app or device supports, you may be able to do things like resizing the font, using a dark theme, and reading notes in popup boxes. Below are notes on several readers we have tested.

Books (formerly iBooks), a reader app which comes pre-loaded on all Apple devices, renders the notes in popup windows with scroll bars. The iOS version works very well on iPads but has not yet been tested on iPhones. It offers nine fonts, two font sizes, four background colors (note colors do not show up in the dark ones), a scrolling option, bookmarking, full-screen mode, and an excellent search function that presents in a single window all appearances of a word or phrase in the book and the notes, with indications of the location of each and generous quotations. On MacOS, the app's performance is unsatisfactory, since popups open at the end of each note and there is no scroll bar to go back.

BookReader displays the book beautifully on Apple's MacOS, with skeuomorphic book appearance, flip animation, bookmarking, full-screen mode, a huge choice of fonts, and an infinite range of font sizes, text colors, and background colors (note colors display well against the dark backgrounds). The app does not support popups: clicking on a number takes you to the appropriate spot in the Annotations at the back of the book. There is an above-average search function, similar to the one on Books except that it quotes less generously from the passages surrounding the chosen words or phrases. The app sometimes has trouble rendering lines of verse in the notes, running the lines together in paragraphs.

Adobe Digital Editions performs well on MacOS, but its layout is very basic and the search function is limited to jumping from one appearance of a word or phrase to the next by forward and back arrows. The app does not support popups, but it offers five font sizes, bookmarking, and full-screen mode. Windows, iOS, and Android versions are available but have not yet been tested.

Cool Reader, an app for Android devices, displays the notes in popup boxes, and it can render the note colors even when using a dark theme.

Google Play Books, an app for both Android and iOS, uploads your books to the cloud so that they are available across devices, and it remembers your place across devices. It also features a web reader that remembers your place in the book but this version doesn’t support popups, instead taking you back and forth between the novel’s chapters and the Annotations at the end.

Calibre is available for all desktop operating systems and can display the notes in popup boxes. It supports only the default black-on-white theme but does display the note colors. The app has been tested on Linux but not yet on Windows or MacOS.

Foliate, an ebook app for Linux, displays the notes in compact popup boxes with scroll bars. It tries to adjust the font size of the notes, so when things like verses are hard to read in the popup boxes, a button on the popup box takes you to the full view of the note at the end of the book. Foliate has many color themes but does not display the note colors in any of them.