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. It also supports bookmarks and colored highlights, as well as in-context notes for marginalia. The app does allow for customization of basics like font, text size, and background color, but the book frame is here to stay. 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. While the app is flexible, the interface is a little dated-looking. This includes ePub as well as MOBI, PRC, AZW, and PDF. BookReaderīookreader is extremely flexible, opening pretty much every text-based book format in existence. There are also some basic font and color adjustments available, but two columns seem off-limits for basic tools. This lets you style the reader’s output with CSS. 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. mobi and ePub files, and then re-export them in other file types. The e-book reader in Calibre can open just about any kind of digital text document, including. 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. You’ll also find some tools that can help you remove DRM, though results can be hit-or-miss. It comes with lots of tools for editing book metadata, adjusting things like author names, cover images, and publication data. It’s a powerful, if somewhat unfriendly, software tool designed for managing a large library of digital books. CalibreĬalibre includes a Mac e-book reader, but it’s mostly for Mac e-book management software. It also only handles ePub files and can’t manage any other file type, which is a bummer. 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.

You can read books in any font on your computer, with adjustable text size, three background colors and up to three columns. It’s a solid competitor for stalwarts like iBooks, offering an attractive and customizable interface. If you want to escape from all the Mac e-book reader apps associated with bookstores and DRM, Kitabu will set you free. For those looking to read an ePub on a larger screen, we’ll look at the best Mac e-book reader apps available in 2021.

E-book readers for iPhone, iPad, and Android abound, as well as dedicated reading devices like the Kindle and Nook. Lovers of digital literature are used to reading on a hand-sized interface.

Mac kindle reader