Jan 07, 2020 Mac users have access to a vast selection of excellent photo-editing apps, but even against its many competitors, Pixelmator stands out as one of the best.
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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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.
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.
![Best Best](https://www.epubor.com/images/uppic/Kindle-for-Mac.png)
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
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.
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.
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
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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Just don'tStealing from an Apple Store is so easy people are doing it time and again
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