You don’t need an Amazon Kindle device to read ebooks. These apps support a variety of ebook formats and can help you turn your PC, tablet, or phone into an ebook reader.
You’ll find lots of ebooks online that you can buy cheap or get for free, but what if you don’t have a dedicated ebook reader? No problem. Just fire up an ebook reader app on your phone or tablet. Whether you’re trying to read Mobi, EPUB, or PDF files, there is an ebook app that will work for you. Read on for your best options.
You don’t need a Kindle device to read Amazon books. The Kindle app supports a host of different devices, including Windows and Mac computers, as well as iOS, iPadOS, and Android mobile devices. It can handle books from Amazon as well as anything from your library via Libby.
While reading, you can easily change the color, font, text size, line spacing, and other attributes. Mark up and annotate text passages, use an X-ray feature to get more details on characters and other elements, bookmark your current page and search for specific text. Need the definition of a certain word? Just highlight it, and a dictionary or Wikipedia entry pops up to describe it.
The Google Play Books app isn’t as powerful as the Kindle app, but it’s no slouch. Available for the iPhone and iPad, Android devices, on the web, and for the Chrome browser through a Chrome Extension, this app plays host to any books you grab from Google Play, as well as PDFs and other formats downloaded from third-party sites.
You can change the text and color attributes, view the book’s original pages, add a bookmark, and even hear the book read aloud. From the Settings screen, you can turn on dark mode, use an offline dictionary, and enlist the volume key to turn pages.
Designed for Apple devices, Apple Books is the built-in reader for ebooks and audiobooks downloaded from Apple’s bookstore. Within the app, you can adjust font type and size, theme, and brightness, as well as bookmark pages, annotate text, and make notes.
Turn on Scrolling View to scroll through a book vertically instead of swiping left on each page. Long-pressing on a word gives you the option to copy it, look it up, highlight, make a note of it, search for it through the book, or share it with someone else. The Search feature takes you to a specific word or page number.
Designed to let you read books, magazines, and other content from Barnes & Noble, the Nook app is supported on Windows, iOS/iPadOS, and Android. In the app, you can change the font style and size, margins, line spacing, justification, and brightness. You can easily sail through the book’s pages via a handy slider bar at the bottom or jump to a specific page. Tapping and highlighting a word brings up a definition. A dedicated Settings pages lets you tweak the page-turning options, manage your library, and control the reader itself.
Aimed at both ebooks and audiobooks, the Kobo Books app is available for Windows, macOS, iOS/iPadOS, and Android. It lets you read books downloaded from the Kobo store as well as imported books saved as PDFs or EPUBs.
Tap the screen, and a series of icons appears on the lower right. From here, you can play with the font style and size, layout, and theme. Choose to use the volume keys to turn each page, change the orientation, and tweak the page transition. Highlight a word to retrieve its definition or annotate it. You can also bookmark a page and view a list of chapter headings and other details.
Libby allows you to borrow ebooks from your local library; all you need is a library card. The app works for iOS, iPadOS, and Android devices, or you can use it directly through your web browser. After you sign in with your library card and account, you can browse or search for a book among the virtual stacks.
In the app itself, you’re able to tweak the text size, the lighting, and the book’s design. The app allows you to bookmark and highlight specific pages and areas of the book. You can also search for text and swipe along the bottom to jump to a certain page. Pressing down on a word lets you view a definition, highlight it, or search for it within the book. And if you don’t like the Libby ebook reader, you can send borrowed library books to the Kindle app instead.
FBReader lets you read books downloaded from its own network library or those that you manually import from other sources. The app supports a variety of formats, including PDF, ePub, mobi, RTF, HTML, and plain text. Versions of the app are available for iOS, iPadOS, Android, Windows, and Linux.
When reading an ebook, you can switch between light and dark themes, search for text, change the orientation, and zoom in or out. From the Settings screen, you can adjust the text style and size, margins, appearance, color, and page turning. Enhance FBReader by installing and integrating different apps and plugins, such as an offline dictionary and a PDF reader.
The basic app is free, but a $4.99 premium flavor kicks in a text-to-speech reader, a translator, and built-in support for PDF and comic book formats.
Designed for iOS and iPadOS, KyBook offers access to various book catalogs, including Project Gutenberg and Feedbooks. You can add additional online catalogs and incorporate books from folders saved on your device or among your cloud-based storage sites. The app supports a healthy array of formats, such as ePUB, PDF, mobi, text, and RTF.
In the app, you can change the font style and text as well as the color theme. You can search for text, listen to your book via text-to-speech, and set a timer to go off when you want to stop reading. Pressing down on a word lets you copy it, translate, define it, search for it, share it, mark it, or hear it read aloud. You can also view chapter headings, bookmarks, notes, and other items.
The basic version is free. A one-time $4.99 payment removes the ads and kicks in a dictionary, themes, auto scrolling, and several other options. Pay $4.49 for three months or $14.99 for a full year, and you get access to the KyBook cloud with book storage and syncing.
Android-only FullReader allows you to pull in a variety of different ebooks from your device or from the cloud. The app supports many different formats, including ePUB, PDF, mobi, txt, doc, docx, and HTML. You can scan for books stored on your device and then import the ones you want to read. For books stored in the cloud, you connect to Google Drive, Dropbox, or Microsoft OneDrive, and download them to your device.
While you’re reading a book, you can tweak the font style and size, text color, background color, brightness, and theme. The advanced settings allow you to play with the layout, spacing, alignment, page turning, and other elements. You can view chapter headings and jump to a specific chapter. Pressing down on a word brings up a menu where you can highlight it, translate it, or share it. You can even make voice notes and hear the book read aloud to you.
Aimed at iOS/iPadOS and Android devices, PocketBook Reader lets you grab books from its own store, those stored on your device, those saved in the cloud (Dropbox, Google Drive, and PocketBook Cloud), and those downloaded from Google Books. The app supports both ebooks and audiobooks in 26 different formats, such as ePUB, mobi, PDF, RTF, text, HTML, MP3, and M4B.
Within the app, you can change the font style and size, brightness, colors, margins, reading mode, and other attributes. You can also bookmark pages, jump to a specific page, and hear the book read aloud. Pressing down on a word allows you to highlight it, search for it, or define it. To tweak the app, jump directly to the Settings screen where you’ll find a variety of options.
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Surviving a long and varied career in publishing, advertising, and IT, Lance Whitney now wears a few different technology hats. By day, he’s a journalist, software trainer, and sometime Web developer. By night, he’s asleep. These days, he writes news stories, columns, and reviews for CNET and other technology sites and publications. He’s written two books for Wiley & Sons: Windows 8 Five Minutes at a Time in 2012, and Teach Yourself VISUALLY LinkedIn in 2014. Contact Lance via Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
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