The Best eBook Readers: Readest vs. Bookshelves

TL;DR: Apple Books is a storefront that happens to read ebooks. If you own your library, the real choice is between two apps. Readest is open-source, runs on everything (Mac, iOS, Windows, Linux, Android, web), and has the deepest feature set I've seen (side-by-side reading, sentence-level translation, KOReader/WebDAV sync), but it's still v0.x and some marquee features are unfinished. Bookshelves is Apple-only and commercial, but it's polished, ships fast, and pairs a strong reader with a 1.5-million-book built-in catalog. Cross-platform reader? Readest. Living entirely on the Mac and want the nicer native app? Bookshelves. Full breakdown below.

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I spend a significant portion of every day managing and curating an embarrassingly large ebook collection. For a long time, I was a dead tree books guy and honestly, I can be talked in to visiting a book store with very little effort, but for sheer usability and utility, nothing matches a digital collection.

I still rely on calibre for the heavy lifting. While aesthetically, it may look like a Windows app from 1996, nothing can match it feature for feature for format conversion, metadata retrieval from multiple sources at once, file management and search ability. Using it as a reader is a non-starter though.

Calibre Keeps Getting Better | AppAddict

Apple Books

macOS has included an ereader, Apple Books, formerly iBooks, since 2013 when it was introduced as a stand alone app in Mavericks, Mac OS X 10.9. But even before that, iTunes offered ebook management. For casual readers who buy most of their books directly from Apple, it's enough. You get a clean, distraction free reading experience, annotation support, world class typography and excellent synchronization across Apple platforms. Apple Books is a storefront, first and foremost, just like Apple Music. Both are designed to get you to spend money. Apple Books also has very limited support for library management and for many file formats.

The real ereader competition

While there are a lot of options available to Mac users for a native ebook experience, the top tier as I see it comes down to two apps: Readest and Bookshelves.

Readest

Developer: Open-source community (AGPL-3.0) Price: Free and open-source; App Store version available Formats: EPUB, MOBI, KF8/AZW3, FB2, CBZ, TXT, PDF Platform: macOS, iOS, iPadOS, Windows, Linux, Android, Web GitHub: readest/readest

Readest is a modern rewrite of Foliate (the well-regarded Linux ebook reader), rebuilt in Next.js and Tauri v2. It has 21.5k GitHub stars, 89 contributors, and ships on every major platform including a web app at web.readest.com. It's technically a v0.x release (currently at 0.11.17), but the feature list reads like a mature product.

Readest's feature depth is uncommon: parallel reading (two books side-by-side in split screen), DeepL/Yandex translation at the sentence or whole-book level, text-to-speech with multilingual support within a single book, KOReader sync, WebDAV sync, code syntax highlighting for technical books, a reading ruler, paragraph-by-paragraph focus mode, and full accessibility support including VoiceOver, NVDA, and Orca.

The translation feature alone separates it from every competitor in this category. If you read in multiple languages or work through texts in a non-native language, there is no real competition.

OPDS and Calibre integration are first-class, not bolted on. If you run a Calibre library, Readest slots in without ceremony.

There is a catch: AGPL-3.0 licensing keeps the code open, but the business model is donation-based. That's fine for now (the project is clearly active), but it's a different kind of bet than a commercial app with a defined revenue stream. The v0.x version number also signals that the API and sync behaviors may shift. AI summarization and advanced reading stats are still "building," and audiobook support is currently vaporware.

Bookshelves

Developer: CPE Verm. GmbH Price: Free (10-book limit); one-time Pro upgrade ($6.99) Formats: EPUB, PDF, CBZ/CBR/CB7, FB2, MOBI/AZW3/KF8/KEPUB Platform: Apple ecosystem only (Mac, iPhone, iPad) App Store: Bookshelves eBook Reader

I've been using Bookshelves since the day of the first public release. It has always impressed me as the solution for most design issues faced by Mac App Store ereaders. It's 67.4 MB, currently sitting at #24 in the Books category, and the developer ships new features at a blistering pace. The most recent update dropped localization in 33 languages and a batch of reader and comics fixes.

The reading experience is the priority here. Paginated and scroll modes, 10 themes, 10 fonts, full-text search, highlighting, and annotations: all the basics, executed cleanly. Comic and manga readers get CBZ/CBR support with two-page spreads and right-to-left mode, which most ereaders skip entirely.

The built-in catalog is useful in practice: 1.5 million free books from Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, the Internet Archive, and a Spanish-language collection. Standard Ebooks alone makes this worthwhile; that project produces beautifully formatted public domain texts that most readers ignore entirely.

The Pro tier ($6.99) unlocks iCloud sync (progress, highlights, preferences across devices), Calibre wireless transfer, OPDS server access, and highlight export. If you're in the Apple ecosystem and already use iCloud for everything else, this is the path of least friction.

The main drawback is lack of support for any other platform. It's Apple-only by design. If any part of your reading life happens on Android, Windows, or Linux, Bookshelves has no answer for you. It's also not open source and it's not free.

Which one should you use?

Choose Apple Books if:

• You primarily buy books from Apple.
• You only use Apple devices.
• Syncing notes across your Apple ecosystem matters more than library flexibility.

Choose Readest if:

• You own your ebooks.
• You use multiple operating systems.
• You run Calibre-Web or another OPDS server.
• You prefer open-source software.

Choose Bookshelves if:

• You live primarily on the Mac.
• You want a polished native application.
• You care as much about browsing your collection as reading it.
• Most of your library consists of DRM-free EPUB files.