EPUB Reader for all books

Review by eFreeware

If your reading life is scattered across file types, EPUB Reader from Librera is the sort of app that makes sense of it. It is free, it opens EPUB, PDF, MOBI, DJVU, FB2, TXT, RTF, AZW, DOC, DOCX and ODT files, and it has been sitting on more than five million Android devices with a 4.4 average from over 36,000 ratings. That combination tells you it has found a real audience rather than a niche one.

What that audience gets is a reader that treats the book file as the starting point and builds a small toolkit around it. You can change fonts, colors and backgrounds, look up a word in a dictionary, listen to a book read aloud, and pull free titles from OPDS catalogs. The app covers a wide range of formats and reading needs.

I would point this at people who own ebooks from several sources and are tired of juggling three or four readers. It is also a reasonable fit for anyone who wants to listen to a book now and then without buying into a separate audiobook service. The trade-off is advertising, which comes with the free download, and a feature set broad enough that the app asks a little patience of you.

A reader that copes with whatever is in your library

Format support is the headline here, and it is unusually wide. Alongside the usual EPUB and PDF, the app handles MOBI, AZW, DJVU, FB2, RTF, DOC, DOCX and ODT, plus plain text. It can even open books stored inside zip and rar archives, which matters if you have ever downloaded a bundle and not wanted to unpack it first.

That range changes how you use a phone or tablet as a reading device. Instead of converting files on a computer before they will open, you can hand the app whatever you have and get on with reading. Books can also arrive from outside the app: it accepts files opened from other applications and from a browser, and a web page can be shared to it and treated as a book.

The built-in file manager and library tools are what keep this from becoming a folder of loose files. You can organize titles into favorites and tag collections, and a recent list shows what you had open last. A desktop widget puts recent or favorite books on your home screen, which is a small thing that makes a large library feel less like admin.

Making the page look the way you want

Reading comfort is where this app spends a lot of its effort. Fonts, font color, background, size, margins, line spacing and hyphenation can all be adjusted, along with the hyphenation language, and there is an option to skip the author's own styling when a publisher's choices fight with yours. A night theme is included for darker rooms, and brightness can be changed by swiping up or down on the screen.

The page itself is flexible too. You can scroll continuously or flip through pages as in a printed book, and choose one page, half a page or two pages on screen depending on the size of your device. Rotation lock and a left-right movement lock are there for people who read lying down and are tired of the screen turning on them.

For study rather than pleasure, the tools are sensible. Bookmarks and notes can be added as you go, and bookmarks can be exported as text and emailed. Selecting a word or sentence sends it to a dictionary, and a search finds a word or phrase anywhere in the book. A table of contents and a fast reading mode round out the navigation.

Listening, catalogs and where the ads sit

Text to speech is the feature I would expect to surprise people most. The app reads books aloud through a speech synthesizer, so a title you already own can become something you listen to while your hands are busy. That is a different proposition from a subscription audiobook library.

OPDS catalogs are the other route into new material. They let you search for free books from inside the app, which suits readers who work through public-domain titles or run their own catalog. Between that, the file manager and the format list, the app covers finding, storing and reading rather than just displaying one file type.

The free version carries advertising. There are no in-app purchases, and that is worth weighing if you read in long stretches and dislike interruptions. The app was released in February 2019 and the most recent update mentions work on the PDF engine and comics, so the development has not stopped.

What it asks of you before the first page

Setup is mostly about pointing the app at your books. The file manager browses what is on the device, and books stored in archives are supported, so a collection that has never been unpacked is still usable.

The rest is preference rather than configuration. Reading mode, page layout, fonts, spacing and brightness are all choices you make once and then adjust as the mood takes you. There is a fast reading mode for people who want to move quickly, and a night theme for the opposite situation.

The one thing to accept going in is that a reader with this many options takes a little exploration. Nothing about it is complicated, but the app rewards a few minutes spent in its settings before you settle into a book. If you would rather not think about typography at all, the defaults will still get you reading.

Readers who will get the most from it

This is a good fit for the reader with a mixed shelf. If your ebooks come from different shops, arrive as PDFs from work, or sit in archives you never got around to opening, having one app that accepts all of them removes a recurring annoyance. The dictionary lookup and note-taking make it useful for study as well as for novels.

It also suits anyone who wants to listen to books without a separate subscription, since text to speech turns existing files into audio. And it suits people who care how a page looks, because the typography controls are unusually thorough for a free reader.

The advertising is the main thing to accept. If interruptions bother you more than format support matters, that is the trade you are making. For everyone else, the combination of breadth and price is hard to argue with.

A dependable home for a mixed ebook shelf

EPUB Reader earns a place on the phone of anyone who reads in more than one format. It opens nearly everything, it lets you shape the page to your taste, it reads aloud and it can find free books through OPDS catalogs, all without asking for payment. The 4.4 average across a large number of ratings suggests that mix works for a lot of people.

I would recommend it to readers with a varied library, students who annotate as they go, and anyone curious about listening to books they already own. If you want a reader that stays out of the way and never shows an ad, the free version's advertising is the compromise you would be making. Otherwise, this is a capable, well-established choice.

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