Moon+ Reader Pro

Review by eFreeware

Most reading apps on Android are free and fairly shallow, and they pay for themselves with ads. Moon+ Reader Pro takes the opposite approach: it is a paid app with no advertising, and it layers a lot of reading controls on top of that. The format list alone tells you what kind of tool this is meant to be, spanning EPUB, PDF, MOBI, AZW3, FB2, DJVU, CHM, comic archives like CBZ and CBR, and plain documents such as DOCX, ODT, RTF and TXT, plus ZIP and RAR archives and OPDS catalogs.

That breadth is the pitch. If you keep a library that mixes purchased EPUBs, scanned PDFs, a folder of CBZ comics and a few stray text files, this is built to open all of them in one place rather than sending you between three or four apps. It is for readers who care about typography, page behavior and how a book feels under the thumb, and who would rather pay once than put up with a free app's trade-offs.

A reader for people who notice the details

The app is aimed at heavy readers rather than casual ones. Someone who finishes a novel a week and wants the page to turn the way they like, the brightness to sit where they want it and the margins to behave, will find a lot to adjust here. The developer lists more than ten built-in themes with a day and night switcher, adjustable line spacing, font scaling, bold and italic handling, shadow and alpha color options, and a fading edge effect.

Comics and PDFs are treated as first-class citizens rather than afterthoughts. Comic archives open directly, and the PDF side includes form filling, highlighting, annotation and handwriting, night mode with six additional PDF themes, a dual-page layout for landscape screens and a smart scroll lock. That combination is unusual in a single app, and it is the main reason someone with a mixed library would consider paying for this rather than settling for a basic viewer.

It also suits readers who want to protect what they are reading. There is an option to require a password at startup, with fingerprint recognition supported, which matters if you share a tablet or leave one lying around. A book-to-home-screen shortcut and a widget shelf let you keep current titles within reach.

Reading controls that go unusually deep

This is where the app separates itself from simpler readers. The developer describes 24 customizable operations, covering screen taps, swipe gestures and hardware keys, which can be mapped to 15 different events such as search, bookmarks, theme switching, navigation and font size. In practice that means you can set up the app so the gestures you naturally make do the things you most often need.

Page turning is handled several ways: touch screen, volume keys, and even the camera, search or back keys. There are five page-flip animations with adjustable speed, color and transparency, and a real page-turning effect for readers who want the screen to feel like paper. For hands-free reading there are five auto-scroll modes, including a rolling blind mode and scrolling by pixel, line or page, with speed you can change while it runs.

Smaller touches round this out. You can adjust brightness by sliding a finger along the left edge of the screen, and the app includes a blue light filter that the developer says reaches up to 95 percent, along with a reading ruler in six styles for keeping your eye on one line. Paragraph handling covers intelligent indenting and trimming unwanted blank lines, and text can be justified with hyphenation. None of this is essential to reading a book, but each piece is the sort of thing that becomes habit once it exists.

Text-to-speech, dictionaries and the rest of the toolkit

Text-to-speech is built in and driven through the phone's TTS engine. You can start it by shaking the device, and headset and Bluetooth keys can control playback, which makes it usable while your hands are busy. PDFs support speech as well, and the Pro version handles PDF annotations quickly.

Reference tools sit alongside the reading view: highlighting, annotation, dictionary lookup both offline and online, translation and sharing. The dictionary support extends to external tools such as ColorDict, GoldenDict and ABBYY Lingvo, so readers who already rely on one of those can keep using it. EPUB3 multimedia content, including video and audio, is supported, and popup footnotes work as you would hope.

The library side is more capable than the name suggests. There is a My Bookshelf design with favorites, downloads, authors and tags, along with custom book covers, search and import. You can group books and place them on the home screen as a widget. The app connects to online ebook libraries and to a personal calibre server, and there is a My Files tool for managing book files across your storage in a full file-manager style.

Backup and restore go to the cloud through Dropbox or WebDAV, and reading positions sync between phones and tablets, so you can pick up where you left off on another device. A name replacement and role reversal feature lets you swap character names in a text, which is a niche option but a genuinely unusual one.

What the app costs and what you get for it

Moon+ Reader Pro sells for $11.99 as a one-time purchase. There are no ads in the app and no in-app purchases, so the price you see is the whole cost. For a reader you might open daily for years, that is a straightforward proposition, and it is a different model from the free readers that rely on ads to fund themselves.

The developer backs the purchase with a 30-day money-back guarantee, which takes some of the risk out of paying up front for something you cannot try in a limited form. The app has been on Google Play since the end of 2010 and has passed one million installs, with a 4.2 average across more than 106,000 ratings. Those numbers suggest a long-running product with a settled audience rather than a new arrival.

The trade-off is simply that this is not a free download. If you read occasionally and a basic viewer covers your needs, the price is the main thing to weigh. If you read constantly and want the control described above, the cost is easy to justify against the hours you would spend inside it.

How it compares with the alternatives

The obvious comparison is with the free readers that come preinstalled or ship with a store. Those tend to handle EPUB well and little else, and they rarely offer gesture mapping, auto-scroll, comic archive support or PDF annotation in the same place. If your library is EPUB-only and you never adjust anything, a free reader will do the job, and the gap between them will feel small.

A dedicated PDF editor is another route. If your main need is filling forms and marking up documents, a tool built around that will go further than a reader that also handles PDFs. Here the appeal is having annotation, night mode, dual-page layout and speech in the same app you read novels in, rather than switching between two.

Comic readers are a third option, and again the question is whether you want one app or several. Moon+ Reader Pro opens CBZ and CBR files alongside everything else, so a reader with a mixed shelf gets one place to keep it all. The case for paying is strongest when you would otherwise be juggling two or three separate apps.

Finally, there is the question of a subscription reading service. Those give you access to a catalog, which is a different thing entirely from a reader for files you already own. This app is for the books on your device and the libraries you connect to, not for borrowing titles from a store.

A considered purchase for committed readers

Moon+ Reader Pro is a mature, feature-dense reading app with a price attached, and it makes most sense for people who read a great deal and want the screen to behave exactly as they like. The format support is broad enough to cover a messy library, the gesture and paging controls go deeper than most, and the PDF side is more capable than the reading apps that treat documents as an extra.

The people who will get the most from it are those with mixed collections, those who use text-to-speech regularly, and those who want their reading positions synced across a phone and a tablet. The people who will not need it are occasional readers whose books are all EPUB and who never touch a setting.

At $11.99 with no ads and no in-app purchases, plus a 30-day money-back guarantee, the risk of trying it is limited. The 4.2 average from a large body of ratings points to an app that has kept its users over a long period. If reading is a daily habit for you, this is a reasonable place to spend once and stop thinking about it.

What's new in version 10.7

v10.7 ● New "Pagination based on character size" option ● Optimize comic book info reference import ● Improve content loading for broken TOC epub books ● Allow disable/enable top-right corner quick bookmark ● Fix pdf annotation doesn't save issue while switching recent books