The best apps for reading on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. By William Gallagher 7 months ago. As Apple would charge Amazon 30% for any purchase made through the Mac or iOS app, Amazon won't let. The best apps for reading on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. By William Gallagher 7 months ago. As Apple would charge Amazon 30% for any purchase made through the Mac or iOS app, Amazon won't let. The best Mac apps for 2020 By Mark Coppock October 9, 2020 If you’ve heard the phrase, “Once you go Mac, you never go back,” you know it holds true. Macs are premium devices with amazing. Download the free top-rated Kobo app to read anywhere, on any device, and choose from our catalogue of over 4 million of the world's best eBooks and magazines.
Lovers of digital literature are used to reading on a hand-sized interface. E-book 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 e-book reader apps available in 2018.
Kitabu
If you want to escape from all the mac e-book reader apps associated with bookstores and DRM, Kitabu will set you free. It’s a solid competitor for stalwarts like iBooks, offering an attractive and customizable interface. You can read books in any font on your computer, with adjustable text size, three background colors and up to three columns. But while you can add bookmarks, you won’t find any annotation options within the application, meaning it’s not as powerful for taking notes or highlighting text as some of the other applications we’ve reviewed. It also only handles ePub files, and can’t manage any other file type.
Calibre
Calibre includes a Mac e-book reader, but it’s mostly for Mac e-book management software. It’s a powerful if somewhat unfriendly software tool designed for managing a large library of digital books. It comes with lots of tools for editing book metadata, adjusting things like author names, cover images, and publication data. You’ll also find some tools that can help you remove DRM, though results can be hit or miss. Calibre can build and host an OPDS e-book server, allowing you to share files to mobile devices from your Mac, and search dozens of e-book stores simultaneously to find just the book you’re searching for.
The e-book reader in Calibre can open just about any kind of digital text document, including .mobi and ePub files, and then re-export then in other file types. The reader app itself isn’t visually appealing or customizable as Kitabu, but enterprising users can heavily customize its appearance using the user stylesheet function. This lets you style the reader’s output with CSS. There’s also some basic font and color adjustments available, but two columns seem off-limits for basic tools.
BookReader
Bookreader is extremely flexible, opening pretty much every text-based book format in existence. This includes ePub as well as MOBI, PRC, AZW, and PDF. While the app is flexible, it is a little buggy on High Sierra, and the interface is very dated looking. It uses a very old-style book image to frame what you’re reading, which doesn’t really mesh with macOS’s newer, non-skeuomorphic design. The app does allow for customization of basics like font, text size, and background color, but the book frame is here to stay. It also supports bookmarks and colored highlights, as well as in-context notes for marginalia. All of these can be viewed in a context menu together, letting you zoom to your annotations and read your notes without having to find them first, though that is a pretty standard feature in e-book apps.
Adobe Digital Editions
While Adobe Digital Editions for the Mac is often buggy and crash-prone, it does open ePub and PDF files without complaint. If you copy files to the app’s library, you can also use some basic highlighting and annotation tools. It supports Adobe’s own DRM and could be the official reading app for libraries that don’t use OverDrive. It’s far from a crowd favorite, but it is free and it is flexible.
iBooks
macOS users are fortunate enough to have one of the best Mac e-book reader apps installed on their computers from the start. iBooks is an excellently designed application, supporting all the necessities of an e-book reader. It’s significantly customizable and includes strong highlighting and annotation tools. The app supports columns and page turning on a trackpad swipe, and connects with the pretty-okay iBooks store. Sync across all your Apple devices is a great benefit too, so you can start a book on your subway ride home and pick it up on your iMac later. You can also import ePub and PDF files from around the web, provided they’re DRM-free. Opening other e-book file types is outside iBooks’ reach, however.
Kindle
Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader is the direct competitor to Apple’s iBook’s reader. It doesn’t support ePub files, but it does support Amazon’s own semi-proprietary .mobi file extension. It offers the best support for books purchased directly from the Amazon Kindle store, and that’s where you’ll find the most customization options. The degree of interface customization is somewhat limited, however, with granular-looking sliders providing only three to five levels of actual tweaking. But annotations are excellent, with a notebook feature for marginalia, great highlighting tools, and Amazon-provided backup to sync across devices and keep your progress updated. You can also see what other users are highlighting, if that’s a feature you’d enjoy. If you like reading e-books, you probably can’t avoid using the Kindle software at one point or another. For being forced on you, it’s not actually that awful.
Conclusion
If you’re working with files from an online store that uses DRM, that store’s reader is your best (and generally only) bet. Both iBooks and Kindle are decent apps, offering functional annotation tools and a healthy degree of customization. For ePub files not connected to any DRM system, either Kitabu or iBooks are both solid choices for Mac e-book reader apps. Users managing a large library of their own e-books will definitely want to explore Calibre’s power and functionality.
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For the last few decades, reading printed books has been on the decline year to year. Some part of the change can perhaps be attributed to the rise in other forms of entertainment (e.g. Netflix and iTunes), but mostly it’s just been all of us collectively deciding to switch to a variety of book reading apps.
In 2011, Amazon announced that they were selling more electronic books than physical ones through their Kindle platform, which was available on all Kindle devices, as well as smartphones, tablets, and personal computers. Apple with the iBooks ePub reader for Mac, iPad, and iPhone was not too far behind. The rest of the apps for reading books were generally created by smaller third-party startups.
While reading on dedicated devices, such as Kindle, Nook, or Kobo, now takes the top spot, with smartphones and tablets coming in second, reading books on Mac also has its own benefits, which have long been overlooked. Let’s see how and why you should read more on your Mac.
What Are The Best Book Apps For Mac
Reading on your Mac has a few advantages over specialized readers or your smartphone. First of all, you have enough screen real estate to easily process a book of any kind, especially if it involves illustrations and graphs, which you can enlarge and modify as needed.
Second, reading on Mac doesn’t lock you into a specific format, such as .mobi, .epub, or PDF. If you’ve been wondering how to read book online, it’s practically only possible on Mac.
Third, as you read on your Mac, taking notes and annotation becomes so much easier. Reading could be a truly educational experience, which in turn could elevate the quality of your reading material.
Luckily, all the best book apps are available on Mac for less than the price of a single magazine. Most popular app examples include Kindle, iBooks, and MarginNote.
Is Kindle reader for Mac a good choice?![]()
The most widely used reader for Mac is the Kindle app from Amazon. Undoubtedly, its best feature is the access to millions of Kindle-compatible books in the .mobi format. Besides, Kindle for Mac boasts an adjustable interface, where you can change your preferences as to fonts, line-spacing, and background colors.
The drawbacks of using a Kindle reader for Mac is mostly being restricted to .mobi format, available only on Amazon. Plus, the Kindle app doesn’t make it easy to upload your own books that you got somewhere else. For years, the Kindle reader for Mac has been avoiding the idea of bringing hyphenation to the platform, which makes text lines more uniform and easier to read. Although the platform supports hyphenation now, most of its books still don’t.
You can try and download Kindle for Mac on the official Amazon website or in the App Store. Kindle’s main competitor as of now is Apple’s iBooks app. Let’s see how they differ.
Why use iBooks for Mac?
Without a doubt, the iBooks app (now called Apple Books) is convenient simply because it already comes pre-installed with your Mac. You can use it to buy any book in the Apple Book Store, which carries nearly all the popular titles.
Unlike Kindle, Apple Books is the best ePub reader available on the market, although it also does support other formats, most notably PDF. You also have more adjustment options, particularly, hyphenation works much better in the iBooks app than it does on Kindle.
The latest updates to iBooks also included the support for audiobooks, which has expanded a straightforward book reader app into a full entertainment and education experience available at any time, whether you’re driving or relaxing at home.
How to read with MarginNoteBest Pdf Reading App For Mac
The third popular book reader app is MarginNote. While it supports ePub and PDF just like iBooks, its unique features lie in advanced annotations, mind-mapping, and flashcards that allow you to better absorb all the reading material.
Annotations let you highlight text and make quick notes on the margins, whether to explain certain concepts or to save ideas for later use.
To make an annotation with MarginNote:
To use the app to include an excerpt of text in a mind map:
Mac App Store Download Free
To make a flashcard in MarginNote:
Finally, you can export all your notes into Evernote, Anki flashcards, iThoughts mind-mapping, or print.
MarginNote is an indispensable ePub reader for Mac if you’re a student, professional researcher, lawyer, or just like to read challenging books that need some breaking down for better retention.
Make reading experience more focused
In the end, no matter which app you choose for reading, you should hope for a good, distraction-free reading experience, where you can focus on one thing at a time.
HazeOver is a lightweight Mac utility that allows you to automatically dim everything on your screen but the currently active app. It lives in the background but is always available in your menu bar in case you need to adjust some preferences, such as the level of dimming.
So when thinking about the best book reader app for your Mac, lean towards Kindle only if you already have a large library of .mobi books. Otherwise, choose the iBooks app for lighter reading materials and MarginNote when you really need to dive into something worth contemplating. Accompany all of these apps with HazeOver to improve your reading experience and minimize any distractions.
Best of all, you can try MarginNote and HazeOver for free via Setapp, a platform of more than 150 Mac utilities that bring solutions to any app-related problems. What’s next on your bookshelf?
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