Little by little, smartphone owners from all over are increasingly using their devices to read books and novels. Of course, iOS device owners are among the top of this list, with excellent alternatives to read books available across all their devices. What makes things even better of course is Apple’s own iBooks and its iBook Store, which has stepped up the competition and made other apps in the App Store even better.
So if you read a lot on your iPhone or other iOS device and you are looking for the app that offers the best reading experience/prices/options, read on as we take a look at the best 5 free ebook readers available on the App Store.
- But if all you want is to read your current books on your Mac, these apps are your best bet. If You Want A Store-Free Alternative: Kitabu If you’re not using Mavericks, or would rather avoid software tied to a specific online bookstore, Kitabu is worth looking into.
- ISkysoft PDF Editor 6 Professional - The Best Alternative PDF Reader for Mac to Adobe Acrobat Reader iSkysoft PDF Editor 6 Professional for Mac is a professional PDF editor which can also play the role of best Mac PDF reader and editor.
Kindle
The Kindle reading app for iOS has improved dramatically over the past few months and now provides the best experience for book lovers on many fronts. To start, the Kindle app boasts the vast Amazon book catalogue, which is by far the most complete ebook store on this list. In order to purchase books however, users need to do it from a web browser. But this slight annoyance is rapidly forgiven once you start using the Kindle app, which offers easily the most comfortable reading experience with customizable fonts, an easy-to-access dictionary and different backgrounds.
Additionally, Amazon’s ebooks tend to be always slightly cheaper than any other competing platform, plus they can be read on almost any device, including your Mac or PC both on native apps or online, something that our next alternative can’t do.
iBooks
iBooks was introduced a couple of years ago by Apple as a response to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other ebook sellers of the time. Since its very beginning iBooks has been a great app for reading ebooks. The interface is very good (although not as clean and simple as the one on the Kindle app) and the iBooks Store offers a more impressive catalogue every day. Books can (obviously) be purchased from within iBooks itself and the app syncs seamlessly via iCloud no matter if you use your iPad, your iPhone or your iPod Touch to read.
The one major drawback that iBooks suffers from is that Apple’s is yet to release a desktop app for users to be able to read their purchases somewhere else other than on their iOS devices. On the positive side, iBooks supports the EPUB ebook format, which Amazon’s Kindle does not.
Nook
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.
Barnes & Noble’s ebook reading app follows the same strategy as Amazon’s. Sell books through the store’s website and have them accessible on any device, including on Macs and PCs through the web. The Nook app also offers compatibility with the EPUB format, making it more versatile than the Kindle app. However, the reading experience is slightly below that of the Kindle and iBooks apps mainly due to the use of a somewhat overcomplicated interface. In addition to that, Barnes & Noble’s ebooks tend to be slightly more expensive than Amazon’s.
Kobo
Lately, Kobo has become very competitive and its ebook reading app clearly shows that. The app supports EPUB files and most importantly, native Mac and PC apps where you can read all your purchased books. Its most interesting feature however is its social integration, which allows you to see what your friends are reading, what they think about books, the time a book has been read and finished, reviews from other readers and more, all without exiting the app.
Goodreads
To really appreciate the value of the Goodreads reading app, you will need to become a member of their website (we’ve done a review of it too). Once that is done however, you will enjoy what is perhaps the best and most complete book sharing service. The app allows you search and download from a catalogue of around two thousand books that you can enjoy for free.
Reading in the app is quite pleasant but nothing revolutionary. The app’s real strength lies in its ability to allow you to share comments and opinions about your favorite books, as well as providing you with a very convenient way to classify the books that you are reading now, that you plan to read and the ones that you already finished.
There you have it. Kindle and iBooks are easily the best ebook reading apps as we’ve already mentioned before. They both have their drawbacks, but unless you are already heavily invested on any of the other alternatives, you can’t go wrong with either Apple’s or Amazon’s alternatives.
Also See#ebooks #ipadDid You Know
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Take your love for literature to a new level! With the best audiobook apps for iPhone and iPad in 2019, you will be able to listen to your favorite books whenever and wherever you want.
If you love audiobooks, then you very well know that it can be an enthralling way to keep you occupied during extended travels or long road trips. Once you go with a suitable audiobook app, your iPhone can become your mobile library, and you don’t have to miss out on an interesting book ever again.
There are different types of audiobook apps. It’s hard to classify one particular app as the best as the choice mostly depends on what exactly you’re looking for. The subscription services take different approaches to their functioning. Some offer unlimited online streaming while some give you a limited number of downloads every month and letting you own the downloaded books.
Best iPhone Audio Book Apps of 2019
#1. Audible
The Audible app is arguably the biggest and most popular among the audiobook apps available in the market. Audible offers fantastic audiobook file management by segregating audiobooks into two types, the audible direct downloads, and the iPod library content. This app also translates and shows most of the iTunes meta-data such as chapter, summary, and categories thus helping you organize your library more efficiently.
Audible offers you the usual player controls such as play-pause, R-F, chapter navigation, bookmarking options, scrubbing and speed of narration. Audible’s best feature by far is the option to directly download the audio books from audible.com for offline listening.
Price: Free
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#2. Audio Books
Audio books by audiobooks.com is a cloud-based platform that provides a good audiobook app for both the iOS and Android users. As a subscriber, you can pick from a collection of about 50,000 audiobooks encompassing almost every genre.
You can use the search feature to discover new audiobooks and then can either stream these audio books or download them for offline listening. The app gives you the necessary controls like playback speed, auto bookmarking and other such features. It also lets you sync across devices letting you continue listening to the audiobook on whichever device you are using.
Price: Free
Download
#3. Overdrive
The Overdrive Media Console app offers you mp3 audiobooks that can be downloaded to the iDevice library. Presently, this app only allows direct library downloads using Safari. You may find the downloading process slightly awkward at first.
The app also needs a valid library card for downloads as it works as a gateway to the public libraries’ collections. Using the “Get Books” feature in the app, you can locate close by libraries and add them to the app. The one not so likable aspect of this app is the download limit of 3 imposed on the user. The app gives you a standard audiobook player with all the usual features and a useful file management system including selective file downloads and rapid file deletion.
Price: Free
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#4. Scribd Audio Books
Scribd is a popular platform hosting a ton of e-books that can be read online. Now, it is offering audiobooks as part of its on-demand service letting users stream or download an unlimited number of audiobooks from its 30,000 title collection. You can get this for a monthly fee of $8.99 along with access to Scribd’s vast e-book collection. After finding the book you want from Scribd’s library, you can add it to your library, and can even download it if you wish to read it offline.
At the price point, it’s offered at, Scribd’s new audiobook service is certainly enticing enough to try out.
Price: Free
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#5. LibriVox Audio Books
If you are one of those audio bookworms who are not after the most recent bestselling books, then LibriVox can be a pretty good audio books app for you. This app gives you access to more than 15,000 free titles predominantly filled with public domain works including classics and out of print books.
You can search by the book’s title, author or genre. On finding the right book, you can save it and listen to multiple books as you desire. You can also have limitless bookmarks along with a sleep timer. You may find the narration standards to fluctuate, but for the cost of nothing, you can get access to great audiobooks.
Price: Free
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#6. Audio Books 15000+
As the name itself suggests, this app offers you a selection of over 15,000 audiobooks for your listening pleasure.
Once you download the app, simply search through the different titles in varying genres like classical, fantasy, children, etc. Just select the one you want and download it for listening to it anytime offline.
All the books have proper descriptions and also the option to be played back in split tracks. You get the usual audiobook playback controls. Best of all, this app is completely free yet provides you decent audiobook collections.
Price: Free
Download
#7. Bookmobile Audiobook and Podcast Player
The Bookmobile app is designed particularly for reading out audio books which mean that it’s optimized for spoken voice and therefore delivers a clean, can output. This app provides an excellent audiobook player that’s easy to use while loaded with playback adequate features.
This app lets you import content from your iTunes library, the Internet and even from RSS feeds. The app functions very smoothly with both DRM-enabled content and non-DRM-enabled content. In fact, you can download non-DRM audio directly into the App.
Price: Free
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#8. Audiobooks Now
What has caught my attention in this app is the gigantic collection of over 85,000 audiobooks. You can browse through the entire library and download your favorite books to listen. And yes, once you have downloaded the books, you don’t need an Internet connection to listen to them.
The app provides audio playback speed control, and there is also a manual bookmark and labeling feature. You will be able to skip books within a track list. Using cloud service, you can sync your books across your devices.
Price: Free
Download
#9. SmartBook
“SmartBook” is a fully-featured audiobook app for iOS, which lets you download and listen up to 11,000 books for free! You can import and play any book. The app is able to remember where you stopped listening so you can start off where you left the last time. Besides, it lets you keep a tab on your status as well.
You can adjust the playback speed and also shorten the silences. It has the support of multiple files including MP3 files, M4B and M4A files. Moreover, you can use the sleep timer to set the app to automatically stop once you have listened to your fav book at night.
Price: Free
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#10. vBookz – Free Audiobooks
vBookz is a great audiobook app for kids learning how to speak and read or for people with visual impairments. It offers a unique read along male or female voice synthesizer, which can be enabled or disabled. Even if you do not like voice synthesizers, the app provides a great collection of e-books to keep you hooked.
Book Reader Software
The app gives you the facilities to bookmark, choose and resize fonts, opting between night and day reading, a pretty good search feature and animated page turning. If you are a German, French or Spanish speaker, then the app offers some book versions in these languages.
Price: $4.99
Download
That’s all, folks!
What’s your favorite?
Ten to one, you have picked out some of the audio books from this list to enhance your listening experience. May I know their names and the features you have appreciated in them?
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