Are you a bibliophile looking to move your love for books to your Mac? Or do you simply need something efficient to read important ebooks? Whoever you are, the macOS App Store can help you with its wide selection of ebook-reading apps.
We know how difficult it might be to comb through various ebook readers, looking for the right one. This is why we’ve helped you go through the App Store and picked our favorite free ones for you to choose from.
1. Yomu
Yomu is an absolute delight for any book-lover. It allows you to upload books or files from Finder and sort the books in your library by author and format. With Yomu, you can read EPUB, PDFs, .mobi files, comics, and even old Kindle-form ebooks.
However, if you prefer to read comics on your iPad, we have a list of the best comic book reader apps on the iPad.
As for the reading experience, Yomu gives its users extensive customization options. You can activate two sets of dark modes, a sepia tone for paper-reminiscent reading, a light mode, and a few others. You can even set it to automatically cycle through day and night mode based on your system-wide dark mode settings.
Under Theme in the reader menu, you can change Yomu’s font to hundreds of fonts—including the fonts from your Mac.
Additionally, Yomu allows you to bookmark pages, highlight words (then easily access the annotations from the library), search through books, change reading directions, and add specific notes to annotated parts of the book—all for free!
However, without Yomu Pro, you can’t add more than ten books at any given time to your library. It costs $4.99, which unlocks more space in your library, and gives you access to cloud storage to access your books on different devices.
Download: Yomu (Free, premium version available)
2. Ebook Reader
eBooks.com’s Ebook Reader is the best option for people who primarily own books on eBooks.com. You can sign in to your account and sync all the books you’ve bought or have been gifted on their website to their app.
You can easily sign up on the website—it’s completely free. But if you don’t want to use eBooks.com, a few classics come with the app. You can also download your ebook and then open it in the app. Here’s how to do so:
- Open Finder by clicking the icon on the Dock.
- Find the folder you downloaded the EPUB or PDF into (for example, Downloads or Documents).
- Control-click the file and hover your mouse on Open With in the menu.
- Select Ebook Reader, and the file should open in the app.
What we really like about Ebook Reader is how cozy the UI feels. It gives the wooden feel of standing at a real-life bookshelf and trying to pick a book. However, it is designed for iPads and not yet optimized for macOS.
Therefore, only Apple silicon Macs can run this app. If you don’t know what processor your Mac uses, we have a guide on how to find out if your Mac uses Intel or Apple silicon.
And since it’s an iPad app, you can’t move through pages with the keyboard. Instead, you must use the trackpad or mouse to scroll to “swipe” sideways. Also, if you want to open up the menu, you have to use your pointer like a finger and “tap” (click) on the bottom half of the page you’re reading.
Download: Ebook Reader (Free)
3. Novels Hub
If you’d rather not go about downloading the classics individually, you can download Novels Hub at once instead. Novels Hub is a hub for classic books, all already displayed within the app. You only need to star the book you wish to read, and you will automatically add it to your personal library.
By default, the UI adopts ebook-friendly sepia colors and arranges the main page by category. If you prefer other themes, you can select various ones, including dark mode. You can also toggle the books into a list if you prefer it that way. Novels Hub also has a reader for better accessibility, offering a way to listen to the books instead of reading them.
The app contains ads, but you can take them out for $0.99. However, the ads are not intrusive and don’t pop up unless you open a few menus on the main library page.
Download: Novels Hub (Free, premium version available)
4. PocketBook
PocketBook should be your number one go-to app for .mobi books. In fact, after you download PocketBook to your Mac, it will serve as the default app for launching anything with the EPUB file extension.
However, since it’s designed for iPads and iPhones, it will only work on Apple silicon Macs. Unfortunately, this fact is painfully obvious in its unwieldy UI, with buttons in corners well-suited for a more vertical screen. If you want to enrich your reading experience on your iPhone instead, we have a list of apps for book lovers.
Still, you can change the font, layout, zoom level, toggle dark mode, activate bold words, and many other features. But we couldn’t get PocketBook to start the voice reader, so if that’s important, you might need to resort to a different app.
PocketBook has a store you can buy books from and also lets you catalog and save your audiobooks on their app, making it one of the only Mac apps to do so. If you prefer to load your books from the cloud, you can log in and sync your Dropbox and Google Drive.
Download: PocketBook (Free, premium version available)
5. FBReader
If you’re looking for plain and simple—stark, even, in your digital library, FBReader is the way to go. The library removes unnecessary words and opens your space for reading adventures. While it lacks general customizability, it results in a more-than-adequate EPUB reader that you hardly need to customize anyway.
Like Ebook Reader, you can’t add new books from your Mac within the app. So, follow these instructions instead:
- Click Finder from the Dock.
- Open the folder you have your file in or search for it.
- When you find the file, Control-click to open up the menu.
- Select Open With from the menu and click FBReader.
Whatever book you select in this manner will become a permanent addition to your library, and you can always access them from FBReader.
Unlike other EPUB or ebook readers, when you select a book to read from the library, it opens up another window. This means that the library remains there for you to open another book and read multiple books simultaneously.
Download: FBReader (Free, premium version available)
6. Bookari
Do you have an Apple silicon Mac and want to experience the sound and sight of paper flipping as you go through pages? Then, you will love Bookari.
Bookari has a modern-looking UI in black, gray, pink, and transparent dark tones. The free version doesn’t allow you to add books from your cloud storage, but you can upload whatever EPUB file you have and add it to your library. You can long-click the book in the library if you want to see the book’s synopsis and other relevant metadata.
The only downside with Bookari is that most of the good features are behind a paywall. For example, you can get an AI voice to read to you, but that’s behind a paywall. The app also has a lot of ads for an EPUB reader app, which might be off-putting for many users.
Download: Bookari (Free, premium version available)
Read Ebooks for Free While Supporting the Developers
Many of these apps have great features despite the zero-dollar price tag—in some cases, they even have no ads! That is why we highly recommend you buy the premium version of whatever ebook reader you enjoy, so the developers have a good reason to keep updating the app.
Hopefully, you were able to find an EPUB reader that you really enjoy using on your Mac. And if not, remember that you can use Safari’s Reader View to read any digital book you find on the web with a single click.