FBReader: ePub and fb2 reader

In a world where cheap knock-off ebook readers abound, this one stands out like a shining beacon of competency. No greedy “subscriptions!” Yay! Just an honest price for a great program. There really is no downside to this functional, versatile app and it’s well designed user interface. It took a LONG time to find the best. You don’t have to. Just try the free version and you’ll be buying the full version in no time. But … In spite of all the things it does well, there is one glaring feature omission: something it apparently doesn’t do at all. It does not read to you. For the price, this is puzzling. It’s even more puzzling in that the iPhone contains literally dozens of excellent voices. It can even be configured so that screens are audibly read to you. So then, developers, I ask you: How hard can it be to bridge your excellent app to the iPhone native voice synthesis features and create an ebook reader that actually reads? And why has this not been introduced? We want it. Take an already great product and make it world class. But don’t raise the price. For that price it should already have text to speech capability.

I would give this reader all five stars if it were not for one annoying bug that was not fixed during last three or four updates: when I use the phone in portrait mode to read a book, if I accidentally turn it into landscape mode, the reader switches to the new orientation smoothly. However, when I turn it back into portrait mode, the page is misformatted with margins too wide, and page corrupted as a result. it takes two page turns for the problem to correct itself. Therefore, I am forced to go back a page, and then come back to the original page before I can continue reading. This is seem to be a pretty obvious problem, and should be easy to fix, but that has not happened. it seems like a minor problem, but it can be quite annoying when it happens a dozen times per day. Hopefully they will fix it in one of the next releases.

So far, I’m okay with this app. Many setting, no problem with the books I read and it’s FREE. The only problem is when read epub, I can only set line spacing but not paragraph spacing. It’s hard to read. When my eyes leave the screen to look elsewhere, when return it’s hard to find where I read to. If it’s have distinguish between line spacing and paragraph spacing, at least I can see around second or third paragraph that I read previously. And it’s more pretty. Hope you add paragraph spacing option in the near future.