EPUB books, ready to read.
Plainread opens an EPUB book where it is, in a clean, readable window, and does nothing else. No library to import into, no store, no account. Just the book, with its table of contents beside it.
Walden
Henry David Thoreau
- Economy
- Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
- Reading
- Sounds
- Solitude
- Visitors
- The Bean-Field
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Economy
When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.
I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life.
A reader, not a library.
Most EPUB apps want to import your books into a library of their own. Plainread opens the book you choose, wherever it is, and shows it the way a good book should look.
Scroll or turn pages
Read the whole book as one smooth scroll, or in pages, two side by side like an open book. Turn them with the arrow keys, a swipe or a click. Switch with ⌘1 and ⌘2 and stay on the same sentence.
Read it your way
Five typefaces: System Serif, System Sans, Georgia, Palatino and Charter. Zoom, set the line width, justify the text, and read in light, sepia or dark. Your choices stick, for every book.
Find your way
The table of contents in a sidebar (⌘T), with the chapter you're reading marked. Find in the whole book, Back after following a footnote, a Recently Read list, and every book opens where you left off.
Copy with Citation
Select a passage and press ⇧⌘C to copy it in quotation marks with the author, the book's title and the printed page, when the book records page numbers. Or choose Chicago, APA, MLA, or just the quotation marks.
Quick Look and Finder icons
Press Space on a book in Finder to see its cover, contents and text without opening anything. Finder shows each book's cover as its icon.
Spotlight, inside your books
Plainread lets Spotlight read the text of the EPUBs on your Mac, so a search finds a phrase in any book, wherever you keep it. Spotlight starts using Plainread after you next log in.
How it works
There's nothing to set up. Open a book and read.
Open a book
Drag an .epub file onto Plainread's window or Dock icon, or use File › Open. The book stays where it is; nothing is copied or imported. Apple Books is the Mac's default app for EPUB files, so to open books with a double-click, make Plainread the default: one click in Plainread, or Get Info › Change All in Finder.
Read
Scroll through the whole book, or turn its pages, two at a time on a wide screen. Jump with the table of contents. Close the window, and Plainread remembers your place.
Or don't even open it
Press Space on a book in Finder for a Quick Look preview, or search inside all your books from Spotlight.
Private by design
There is no Plainread account and no Plainread server. The app collects no data and makes no connections of its own. Books can't run scripts or load anything from the internet in Plainread.
- No accounts, no sign-in
- No analytics, tracking or ads
- Only reads the books you open
- Never changes your books
- Books can't run scripts or reach the web
- Sandboxed, native Swift app
Requirements
- macOS 14 Sonoma or later
- Opens EPUB 2 and EPUB 3 books:
.epubfiles, and the unzipped EPUB folders Apple Books keeps in iCloud - Books without copy protection (DRM). Books bought in Apple Books or other stores with DRM open only in those stores' apps.
Questions? See Support & FAQ.
