epub.us is a library of books whose copyright has expired — the classics, in full, as real EPUB files rather than scanned pages or web previews. Over 1,500 of them, with more filed every night. A READER, NOT A BROWSER Books are downloaded and rendered on your device. Pages turn; they do not scroll. Three reading grounds — paper, sepia and night — three type sizes and two margin widths, set once and remembered. The reading font is Literata, designed for screens. BOOKS READ ALOUD Hundreds of the titles are also recordings, read by LibriVox volunteers who give their time to it. Chapter list, sleep timer, playback from 0.8x to 2x, and the reader who recorded it is named on the screen. Audio keeps playing with the phone locked, and the lock screen controls it. YOUR OWN FILES, TOO A PDF, EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, FB2 or CBZ already on your phone opens here — from Files, from a message, from anywhere that can hand over a file. It gets the same controls as a catalogue book: drag the bar at the bottom to move through it, tap the page count to go to a page by number, open the book's own contents. A PDF can be zoomed, printed, or laid out again so the text fits the screen at the size you read at. HOLD A WORD Press and hold any word and the app offers two things: mark it, or look up what it means. Marks are picked out in brass in the text, gathered under the bookmark control in the reader and on each book's record; tapping one takes you straight back to that line. Definitions come from Wiktionary and are kept on the device, so a word you have looked up once opens again with no connection. IT REMEMBERS WHERE YOU STOPPED Every book keeps its own position, chapter and percentage. Close the app mid-sentence and it opens there. The library puts what you were reading at the top, with an estimate of how much is left. IT WORKS WITHOUT A SIGNAL Books you keep on your device open with no connection at all — on a plane, on the Underground, anywhere. The library still draws when you are offline. NO ACCOUNT, EVER There is nothing to sign up for. No email address, no password, no reading history on anyone's server. What you read stays on your phone. ADVERTISING, AND WHAT IT DOES NOT TOUCH A banner appears between the shelves in the library. There is no advertising inside a book: once you are reading, nothing interrupts you, and nothing is timed. Every title in the catalogue is free to read in full, with no account and nothing to buy. WHERE THE BOOKS COME FROM epub.us has been cataloguing public-domain literature for years — every title has a written description rather than a scraped metadata dump. Files come from long-established public-domain archives, and copyright status is verified before anything is offered as a download. Recordings come from LibriVox, hosted where LibriVox already keeps them.
Book · iPhone, iPad · Free
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