Over the past year we have rebuilt the reading technology behind eBooks.com. The latest, and most visible, part of that work is the arrival of two completely new eBooks.com reading apps, built separately for iOS and Android.
The apps have already spent several months in the hands of readers. We treated those first months as a soft-launch period, observing how people actually used the apps, gathering feedback, fixing annoyances and refining the details.
Our goal was simple:
A reading experience that is secure, accessible and exceptionally easy to use, and capable of handling almost anything a publisher can put into an ebook.
That includes straightforward novels, of course. But also complex textbooks, scholarly works, fixed-layout titles, illustrated books, manga, mathematical notation, multimedia and other sophisticated EPUB 3 content.
And we wanted all of that capability without turning the reading app itself into an obstacle course.
Software should get out of the way
When you sit down to read a book, the software should largely disappear. That principle guided the development of the new apps. Menus are simplified. Reading controls are placed where you expect them. Navigation is intuitive. Books open quickly. And a good deal of effort has gone into all the small interactions that collectively determine whether software feels awkward or effortless.
That apparent simplicity took a surprising amount of work. The apps went through months of testing and iteration in the hands of real customers. We collected a whole lot of feedback, looked closely at where people hesitated or became confused, and repeatedly refined the interface.
The result is restrained, while there is a lot happening under the surface.
You can test drive the apps here.
Grace in reading
We care about how books look.
Publishers, editors, typesetters and designers invest in page design and layout, and ebook software should respect that work. The new apps have therefore been designed to render publisher-supplied typography and layouts as faithfully as possible, including sophisticated EPUB 3 and fixed-layout publications.
At the same time, reading is personal.
You can adjust fonts, text size, colours, margins, spacing, alignment and other aspects of the reading environment according to your own needs and preferences. The idea is not to impose one “correct” way of displaying a book. It is to preserve the publisher’s design where appropriate while giving readers the freedom to create a comfortable reading experience of their own.
Read almost anything
These apps work equally well with a simple, text-only novel and a complex academic textbook bristling with tables, multimedia and weird characters. They support EPUB 3 and PDF, including content incorporating sophisticated layouts and specialised markup.
The apps accommodate:
- reflowable books and fixed-layout EPUBs;
- Traditional PDFs;
- textbooks and professional reference works;
- mathematics using MathML;
- audio and video incorporated into EPUB publications;
- picture books and richly illustrated works;
- two-page spreads;
- manga and other right-to-left reading sequences.
If you’re reading a novel on the train, much of this capability won’t matter. But when reading more complex books, it matters enormously.
Stronger security with Readium LCP
The new apps also introduce Readium LCP as a core part of the eBooks.com reading platform.
LCP provides robust DRM protection for copyrighted content while allowing us to offer readers a smoother experience than has traditionally been associated with DRM-protected ebooks.
Publishers reasonably expect commercial ebooks to be protected. Readers, equally reasonably, expect buying and opening a book not to involve unnecessary technical friction. LCP allows us to move those two objectives much closer together.
LCP is based on open publishing standards which means that readers need not be locked in to a single proprietary retailer or reading application. eBooks.com has joined a growing ecosystem of booksellers, libraries, institutional platforms and reading applications adopting LCP. The technology is maintained by the European Digital Reading Lab and the wider Readium community, with its security specifications and implementation continuing to evolve.
Accessibility built in
Accessibility was not treated as an extra layer to be added at the end; it influenced every aspect of design from the beginning. The new apps work closely with the assistive technologies built into iOS and Android, including VoiceOver and TalkBack, and provide extensive controls over typography and presentation.
Readers can alter text size, typeface, spacing, alignment, colours, margins and other aspects of the page. We have also developed reading options intended to make ebooks more comfortable for people with dyslexia and other reading or visual preferences.
Accessibility does not have to mean creating a special version of a book or a special mode for a particular group of readers. Often it means giving readers sufficient control to make the same book work well for them.
That philosophy runs throughout the new apps.
Two native apps
Although the iOS and Android apps look and behave almost identically, they are not a single, generic application wrapped for two platforms. They are two separate native applications, built from the ground up for their respective operating systems. The Android app is written for Android; the iOS app is written for Apple’s platform.
That allows each application to take advantage of the capabilities, accessibility services and conventions of its operating system while giving eBooks.com’s customers a consistent experience when moving between devices.
It also gives us a much stronger technical foundation for future development. The code is modern, flexible and designed to be extended as reading technology continues to evolve.
Part of something bigger
The mobile apps are only one part of a much broader renewal of the eBooks.com reading platform.
Earlier this year we introduced our completely rebuilt Online Reader, giving customers a modern browser-based reading environment without requiring them to install any software.
We then added support for Thorium Reader, the open-source desktop reading application built around Readium technologies and available on Windows, macOS and Linux.
And now the new eBooks.com apps complete the picture on mobile.
May 2026
New eBooks.com Online Reader
July 2026
Support for Thorium Reader on desktop
September 2026
New eBooks.com apps for iOS and Android
A more open ebook ecosystem
Together, these developments give eBooks.com’s customers a modern reading environment spanning mobile, desktop and the web. They represent something of a philosophical shift. eBooks.com has been selling ebooks since 2000. During that time, digital reading has become dominated by a handful of enormous proprietary ecosystems in which retailer, DRM system, reading software and sometimes the publishing platform itself are tightly interconnected.
Open standards make it possible for publishers, retailers, software developers and readers to participate in an ebook ecosystem without every component having to belong to the same company. Our adoption of Readium technologies is part of that philosophy.
When you buy an ebook from eBooks.com you can:
- Read it in your browser, without downloading anything,
- Download it to your desktop and read it in Thorium, or
- Download to your mobile device and read it in our new app.
Secure. Accessible. Open.
Taken individually, each of these projects is an improvement to a reading application. Taken together, they represent something much more significant.
eBooks.com has built a modern, LCP-based, multi-platform reading architecture that is simultaneously more secure, more accessible and less proprietary.
Twenty-six years after we first started selling ebooks, the fundamental task has not changed very much: Help you find a book, buy it and read it. Everything we have built over the past year is intended to make that last part better.
