📅 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 the free app 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.
This is one of the few apps that brings me great joy and great value in the many hours I spend in it every week. So not surprisingly I was more than happy to pay for ReadEra Premium, the premium version of the app to support the makers of this app (cost $10.99 in May 2023). Note that you just pay once and can install the app on all devices that have your same Google account.
Some of the features I liked in the Premium version:
File sync: Synchronize all the ebook files between all the devices where you have ReadEra Premium installed. I have set this to sync only on wifi. I cannot believe how I lived without this since now I can pick up my phone or my tablet and continue reading without having to recall if the book or the page is synced on that device.
Sync settings using Google Drive: If you link a common Google account to the Premium app on all your devices, it can sync up the quotes, dictionary words and other settings between all the devices using Google Drive.
Dictionary: Any word I lookup in dictionary is kept underlined in that ebook. Futhermore, all the words I looked up are stored in the app’s Dictionary section for revision. This is also synced between devices if the sync is setup.
Tried with: ReadEra 22.12.12+1720