Best Ebook Apps For Mac

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Turn your phone or tablet into a book with the free Kindle apps for iOS, Android, Mac, and PC. Read anytime, anywhere on your phone, tablet, or computer. Go beyond paper with immersive, built-in features.

Since the popularity of tablets, and subsequently large-screen smartphones, digital book reading has gone mobile. But, reading on a computer is still a popular past time, and for some, it's the best way to digest the classics, bestsellers, and undiscovered gems. If you have a folder full of eBooks and want to know which reader is perfect for your needs, you'll find what you're looking for right now.

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  • Versions: Windows, Mac, Linux Calibre is a powerful free ebook reader, manager AND file converter! It is the Swiss-Army-Knife of ebook management. All you will need for Windows, Mac and Linux computers.
  • Lovers of digital literature are used to reading on a hand-sized interface. EBook readers for iPhone, iPad and Android abound, as well as dedicated reading devices like the Kindle and Nook. For those looking to read an ePub on a larger screen, we'll look at the best Mac eBook reader apps available right now.
  • Versions: Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone (via app store) Adobe Reader is the standard by which all PDF Readers are measured. It is feature rich, with a Read-Aloud option and you to can make pages fluid by reflowing text (like epub and mobi) and enlarge and reduce font size easily.
  • Lovers of digital literature are used to reading on a hand-sized interface. EBook readers for iPhone, iPad and Android abound, as well as dedicated reading devices like the Kindle and Nook. For those looking to read an ePub on a larger screen, we'll look at the best Mac eBook reader apps available right now.
  • Turn your phone or tablet into a book with the free Kindle apps for iOS, Android, Mac, and PC. Read anytime, anywhere on your phone, tablet, or computer. Go beyond paper with immersive, built-in features.

I'd like to take a moment to clarify that this list is for apps that you can download onto your Mac. There are some great e-readers that are web-based, but I've decided not to include them on this list. If you have a favorite web browser e-reader, please feel free to add it to the comments section so others can find out about it.

iBooks

Every Mac comes with iBooks installed. It is perfectly designed to work, not only on your computer but also across all of your mobile devices. So, you can read a chapter or two on your Mac, and pick up on your iPad or iPhone without missing a beat. There is a quick-access button that lets you browse the iBooks Store, where you can download content to iCloud and access on all your supported Apple devices. You can also drag-and-drop PDFs to iTunes from your Mac, so if you've got a great book that isn't in ePub form, you can still read it in iBooks.

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As for the features, iBooks on the Mac has most of the same tools and themes as iBooks on iPhone and iPad, like color options, text size and style customizations, highlighting tools, dictionary lookup, notes, sharing, illustration rendering, voice over, and more.

If you are knee-deep in the Apple ecosystem, iBooks is the best e-reader on your Mac. You'll love the ability to sync your eBooks and audiobooks across all of your devices.

Kindle

The Kindle reader on Mac is ideal for people that purchase, rent or borrow books from Amazon, which supplies the largest digital book collection. When you sign in to your Amazon account, you can access all Amazon books in your library. You can't browse the Amazon books store from the Kindle app, but when you buy a book on Amazon, it will be added to your collection, which you can access from all your devices, whether they are Apple, Android, or Windows. Amazon supports borrowing books, renting textbooks, sampling books, and more. It is especially beneficial to Prime subscribers. Prime reading offers hundreds of free ebooks, magazines, and more. Kindle Unlimited, which is a subscription-based service, lets you read about a million titles (including magazines and newspapers) for a monthly price.

Kindle on the Mac has plenty of customization features, too. You can change the theme to white, sepia, or black, and adjust the font size and style to tailor your reading experience. You can also add highlights and notes. One of my favorite features is the ability to browse through popular highlights from others that have also read the book.

If you have a collection of ebooks you've purchased from Amazon, or if you are a Prime subscriber, use Kindle for the Mac to read and sync your books across all of your devices.

  • Free - Download now
Free apps for mac computer

OverDrive Read

OverDrive is the number one app for borrowing digital content from your local public library. All you need is an active library card and a PIN. Just like borrowing physical books, you can browse your library's entire collection of digital content and check out multiple titles at the same time. When you borrow an ebook or another item, you can download it on your Mac and access it as much as you want during your loan period. When your ebook is due, you don't have to worry about returning it to the library on time, it will automatically be removed from your Mac when your time is up.

The OverDrive Read app on Mac is actually a web browser supported software program, but it's on this list because it is the officially supported app for borrowing books from public libraries.

Although you have to access the OverDrive Read on Mac from a web browser, you can download content for offline reading, listening, or watching. You'll need to bookmark the page so you can access it without an internet connection, but if you remember to download the content while you're online, you can continue reading while offline.

OverDrive Read includes tools for changing the color, adjusting the size and style of font, adding notes, highlighting, and voice over for some titles. It also supports fixed-layout digital books (like comics and magazines) so your favorite illustrated content doesn't look weird on your Mac.

Free mac apps. If you want to read digital books, but prefer borrowing from your local library, OverDrive Read is your go-to app for accessing your loans on Mac.

  • Free - Download now

Adobe Digital Editions

Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) is an ePub reader that makes it super easy to read digital books on your Mac without having to drag them into an app or upload them to a cloud server. Once ADE is on your Mac, you can select it as the reader for any ePub file, so you can get started reading right away. I use ADE for ebooks that I get from HumbleBundle. I occasionally use it for ebooks I download from my public library, too. It supports all ePub formats and PDF files.

You can add a bookmark and highlight text. You can also add notes to pages and passages. Searching a book for a specific word or phrase is as easy as using the Find feature on your Mac.

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If you download and store a lot of ePub files, and don't want to upload them to iCloud for reading in iBooks, ADE is the next best thing.

  • Free - Download now

BookReader

Best Ebook Apps For Mac

BookReader is the e-reader for all files. It supports EPUB, MOBI, PRC, AZW, FB2, Microsoft DOC, RTF, RTFd, xHTML, Webarchive and TXT. No matter what type of ebook you have on file, you can read it on BookReader. It only supports DRM-free files, though, so make sure your digital books don't have digital rights protections before you try to use it.

You can store all of your books in one bookshelf for easy access. It also has a few features that make book reading on the Mac a pleasant experience, like realistic page flipping, hypertext support, Text to Speech, and a fully customizable color option. You can make the font, background, and book border any color available on the spectrum.

If you tend to download a lot of different types of eBook files, you'll be happy with the level of support BookReader has. You can download a free, seven-day trial version to decide whether you want to invest further.

  • $9.99 - Download now

Your favorites?

Do you use a specific e-reader as your go-to app on Mac? Let us know what it is in the comments and tell us why it's your favorite.

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For those who love ebooks, they’re a gift from the literary gods. Carrying a library in the palm of your hand is amazing. And if you can store it on your phone, you’ll never be without a good book. Check out our favorite third-party ebook reader apps for iOS.

Note: Android users can check out the best ebook reader here.

1. Marvin

Marvin can read e-books from your own personal library just as easily as a Calibre-powered OPDS server. It can even search free e-book sites like Project Gutenberg and download what you find. Awesome unique features include extra screen darkening and Flux-like screen warming for late-night reading, awesome copying tools, near-infinite color customization, Deep View, which reads your book and summarizes all the uses of a character or place name, and Karaoke, which flashes individual words on the screen quickly to enable speed reading (a la Spreeder).

Marvin also supports CBX files for comics and a TTS read-aloud function for Siri-powered audiobooks. The highlighting tool is robust but not so easy to access. Annotations and highlighting color could be easier to set. With all the features the app carries, it makes its obnoxious and persistent “upgrade now” banner on the free version a little more understandable, if not forgivable.

2. tiReader

tiReader has big aspirations. The app is more than just an ebook reader app: it’s an omnivorous media viewer with support for annotation. This includes an annotation-friendly photo viewer that builds a table of contents based on the folder structure of a ZIP file, supports DJVU files with bookmarks and annotations, and an audiobook player with support for searchable bookmarks and annotations. The annotation tools are robust and complete. Users just looking for a basic ebook reader app for iOS might be overwhelmed by everything. There’s a lot to tiReader, and if you don’t need all its annotation power, the annotations can make the app feel cluttered.

The app’s design could also be a little more modern. tiReader’s user interface has more of a Windows vibe than an iOS feel. For users with their own ebook libraries, you can link to OPDS servers or cloud services like Dropbox from within the application. You’ll also find built-in connectivity for free ebook repositories like Project Gutenberg. If you want something that can take any kind of media and mark it up, tiReader is where it’s at.

3. KyBook 2

Kybook 2 offers awesome integration with existing free ebook libraries like Project Gutenberg. However, importing your own ebooks into Kybook is a little difficult. The app seems designed primarily for hosted OPDS ebook libraries, so copying an ePub from somewhere like Dropbox is a little complicated. But once you get a book into the app, Kybook 2 offers a good reading experience with strong customization. Users can apply CSS-based stylesheet changes and load custom TrueType fonts. Minimalistic but powerful highlighting keeps the reading experience visually streamlined. It was also smart enough to automatically organize my Star Wars ePubs into series based on their metadata.

4. Hyphen

The best thing about Hyphen is its sleek, modern interface. The app’s reader is functional and pleasant. Adding books is easy with built-in support for OPDS and cloud services. The display can get incredibly dark with just the swipe of a finger. That’s perfect for late-night reading in low-light settings. Default color customization is virtually infinite, and power users can dig deeper with support for CSS stylesheets. Hyphen also sports one of the largest font libraries we’ve seen in an e-book reader app for iOS. Highlighting and annotation tools are available but require a few taps to access the advanced features. This is a good interface trade-off if you only want one-color highlighting, but it might annoy the annotation fanatics among us. Uniquely, highlights can be easily exported as HTML files, providing backup for detailed annotations.

5. Bluefire Reader

Bluefire Reader is a decent e-book reader app for iOS, with functional annotation tools, built-in Dropbox connectivity, an attractive reading mode and flexible text display options. It doesn’t provide any of the advanced features we’ve found in other apps, but it’s a straight-forward ebook reader app that might be appealing to fans of simplicity. Readers can also directly download Adobe DRM ebooks with Bluefire.

Conclusion

Marvin is our personal favorite e-book reading app for iOS. Kybook 2 and tiReader are close behind. Marvin wins thanks to unique features like Deep View, Karaoke, and an ultra-dark night mode. Hyphen has a beautiful interface and is a great basic reader. However, it doesn’t have the additional features we found in other apps. Other ebook reader apps for iOS are frequently missing critical features that some will find hard to go without.

Image credit: EBook between paper books