Which e-book reader should I use?

As long-time Kindle users, Christina and I have had little experience of other e-book readers.

So when Christina decided to make her books available in epub format, we spent some time searching for a suitable alternative to Kindle.

Christina is using the Atticus app to prepare her epub files and we wanted to make sure that we could read them on all our devices so that other potential readers could do so also. We are not claiming that our choices are the ‘best’, simply that they work for us.

Our Criteria

Ideally we would liked to have found a single app that is:

free
simple and intuitive to use
available on all platforms (Windows, MacOS, IOS and Android)

Unfortunately we could find no such product. So we chose a separate favourite for each platform. Our benchmark app was the IOS Kindle app that we have been using for many years.

Our Selection

Apple (MacOS and IOS)

This was the easiest choice. We found that Apple ‘Books’ was easy to use and rendered Christina’s first e-book perfectly, working on iMac, MacBook, iPad mini and iPhone.

Android

We are not generally fans of Android; however, Christina does have a Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 FE which we used for our tests. We didn’t look further than ‘Google Play‘ which worked very well.

Windows

Christina is a Windows user and this proved the most difficult: we tried several options before settling on ‘Aquile‘. It is free and satisfied the usability requirements well. It didn’t quite render the chapter titles in the book as originated but that was only a minor defect.

What have we missed?

Please leave a comment if you think we should have considered other apps. We know of some products (e.g. ‘Calibre’, which I use to convert between file types) but they generally fail on either or both of the free and easily usable criteria.

As long-time Kindle users, Christina and I have had little experience of other e-book readers.

So when Christina decided to make her books available in epub format, we spent some time searching for a suitable alternative to Kindle.

Christina is using the Atticus app to prepare her epub files and we wanted to make sure that we could read them on all our devices so that other potential readers could do so also. We are not claiming that our choices are the ‘best’, simply that they work for us.

Our Criteria

Ideally we would liked to have found a single app that is:

Unfortunately we could find no such product. So we chose a separate favourite for each platform. Our benchmark app was the IOS Kindle app that we have been using for many years.

Our Selection

Apple (MacOS and IOS)

This was the easiest choice. We found that Apple ‘Books’ was easy to use and rendered Christina’s first e-book perfectly, working on iMac, MacBook, iPad mini and iPhone.

Android

We are not generally fans of Android; however, Christina does have a Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 FE which we used for our tests. We didn’t look further than ‘Google Play‘ which worked very well.

Windows

Christina is a Windows user and this proved the most difficult: we tried several options before settling on ‘Aquile‘. It is free and satisfied the usability requirements well. It didn’t quite render the chapter titles in the book as originated but that was only a minor defect.

What have we missed?

Please leave a comment if you think we should have considered other apps. We know of some products (e.g. ‘Calibre’, which I use to convert between file types) but they generally fail on either or both of the free and easily usable criteria.

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As long-time Kindle users, Christina and I have had little experience of other e-book readers.

So when Christina decided to make her books available in epub format, we spent some time searching for a suitable alternative to Kindle.

Christina is using the Atticus app to prepare her epub files and we wanted to make sure that we could read them on all our devices so that other potential readers could do so also. We are not claiming that our choices are the ‘best’, simply that they work for us.

Our Criteria

Ideally we would liked to have found a single app that is:

Unfortunately we could find no such product. So we chose a separate favourite for each platform. Our benchmark app was the IOS Kindle app that we have been using for many years.

Our Selection

Apple (MacOS and IOS)

This was the easiest choice. We found that Apple ‘Books’ was easy to use and rendered Christina’s first e-book perfectly, working on iMac, MacBook, iPad mini and iPhone.

Android

We are not generally fans of Android; however, Christina does have a Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 FE which we used for our tests. We didn’t look further than ‘Google Play‘ which worked very well.

Windows

Christina is a Windows user and this proved the most difficult: we tried several options before settling on ‘Aquile‘. It is free and satisfied the usability requirements well. It didn’t quite render the chapter titles in the book as originated but that was only a minor defect.

What have we missed?

Please leave a comment if you think we should have considered other apps. We know of some products (e.g. ‘Calibre’, which I use to convert between file types) but they generally fail on either or both of the free and easily usable criteria.

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