📅 2023-Jan-12 ⬩ ✍️ Ashwin Nanjappa ⬩ 🏷️ ebook reader ⬩ 📚 Archive
In my never-ending quest for the perfect ebook reading app on Android, I discovered ReadEra. My gold standard for an ebook app is to match all the features that are available while reading ebooks on the Kobo. And I think this Android app is the first one that fulfilled that criteria.
Install: Installing it is straightforward from the Play Store here.
Formats: By default it scans all the EPUB, PDF, DJVU and other ebook formats on the device and displays them under the Books & documents section.
Collections: A book can be marked as favorite (⭐), to read (🕑) , have read (✔) or trashed, and it will appear in those collections, accessible from the top-left menu. It can also be added to your own custom named collection.
Reading: This app had the best book reading features I’ve seen: full screen, bookmarking of pages, table of contents navigation, all kinds of font/text formatting/colors and section-specific progress indicators.
Fonts: The app allows choosing among many of its fonts, the fonts on the phone or fonts you can download and add.
Progress: My current progress in the book is shown through a neat progress bar at the bottom. My progress in the current section/chapter and the title of the current section/chapter is displayed at the top. TOC of the book and jumping through the TOC can be done by clicking the top-right TOC button. All of this can be made to disappear when in full screen mode for full focus.
Text selection: The context menu when text is selected allows so many useful operations: copy, quote, dictionary, translate, note, share and web search. The context menu also has settings where I can customize which dictionary app (I use WordWeb for this), translator app (I installed Google Translate for this) and browser (for search) should be used. Also, the context menu can be simple (show only copy and quote) or advanced (all options are shown) - this is useful for me to do dictionary lookups in a single click.
Filesystem as store: This app does not add books to some store of its own. All my ebook files exist on the Android filesystem as before.
Tried with: ReadEra 22.12.12+1720