5 great e-book reader apps for Mac users

We like to talk about e-books a lot here at the Cometdocs blog, since we so frequently deal with PDFs and other file types that are commonly used when reading e-books either on your desktop computer, e-reader or mobile device.  E-books are great become they give you access to digital books that can be easily transported and viewed just about anywhere without having to lug around physical books.

mac app store

When it comes to apps for reading e-books, of course, there are specific ones for iOS and Windows users. Today we will look at the best e-book reader apps for people who are using Macs. If you have any other suggestions for great e-reader apps for iOS, please let us know in the comment section.

BookReader

While BookReader is a bit pricey, it does have enough features to justify the $9.99 price tag. It supports just about every file type, except MOBI. However, RTF, xHTML, PDF, TXT, FB2 and others work with this app effortlessly. BookReader makes it easy for you to annotate what you are reading and also highlight passages that you find interesting. Among other features, it supports printing, can do conversions into PDF on its own, has a text to speech function and gives you a great way to manage your e-books through its “shelves” option. It’s definitely one of the most complete reader apps that you will find for Mac.

Kindle

If you have a Kindle account and that is what you are using as an e-book reader, then you can download this app in order to read your Kindle books, magazines and newspapers on your Mac device as well. It is optimized for every type of iOS device and the interface is truly fantastic no matter what you are looking at it on. One thing that is lacking is the ability to organize your e-books. There are still no folders or other methods of separating or sorting all of the e-books that you download, which can be a real pain if you have hundreds of documents on your Kindle account. It is of course free, but you need to have an Amazon Kindle account in order to use it, naturally.

Clearview

The great thing about Clearview is that it serves as more than just a reader – it’s a virtual library. The options for organizing your collection of e-books are incredibly expansive, which let you personalize you’re the storage and filing of your collections. Of course, it works with ePub, PDF, MOBI and other file types. However, Clearview does tend to show various file formats in different ways, so you’ll probably find out which type of file format works best for you in Clearview and stick to that one. The best characteristics of the app are definitely its capabilities when it comes to organizing your e-book library. You can get this app from the iTunes store for $6.99.

Kitabu

If you don’t want to spend on an e-reader app and would rather get a free one to try out, then Kitabu is a good option. Of course, since it is a free tool, it is fairly basic in nature. Still, you should have no problem doing exactly what you need to do with it – read an e-book comfortably and effectively on your Mac. One important thing to know about Kitabu is that it only reads ePub format files, so you will have to convert into that format if you have e-books that are in other formats. Even though it’s free, Kitabu has some surprising features, namely, it doubles as a pretty good audio and video player as well.

Calibre

Even though it does have a built-in reader that will get the job done, that is not what Calibre is primarily used for by most people. Calibre is actually management software for e-books, and probably the best one available. Think of it as iTunes for your e-books. If you are looking for the ultimate app for storing your e-books, converting them in and out of various file formats and managing your collection effectively, you really can’t go wrong with Calibre.