Read your own EPUB and FB2 books, plus free libraries

A speed-reading app is only as good as what you can put in it. If you can read only the three books it ships with, you will delete it in a week. So before you care about pace, it helps to know what Freadly opens, where the books come from, and what happens to a file when you drop it in.

The formats it opens

Freadly reads EPUB, FB2, PDF, DOCX, HTML and TXT. The support page also lists Markdown. That covers almost everything people actually have: EPUB from most book shops and public libraries, FB2 from the Russian-language ebook world, PDF for articles and papers, DOCX for drafts, and plain text for everything else.

One firm limit: books with DRM cannot be opened. DRM is the copy protection that stores like Amazon Kindle, Apple Books and Barnes & Noble apply to their own books. Freadly does not break it and will not pretend to. If a shop sells you a plain EPUB, FB2 or PDF with no DRM, it works. Smashwords and some independent publishers sell exactly that. If you are not sure, the shop’s download page usually says which format you get.

Getting a file in

On iPhone and iPad there are three ways.

• The plus button in the Library. Pick a file from Files, iCloud Drive or wherever your files live.
• Share. In Files, Mail or a messenger, open the book, tap Share and choose Freadly.
• Folders. The Sync screen watches the Freadly folder in Files and any other folder you add, Downloads for example. New books and articles show up in a list. You tick the ones you want, and the app converts, cleans and adds them. This is the easiest way to get a pile of books out of a download folder in one go.

More about the iPhone and iPad app: EPUB reader for iPhone and iPad.

The app opens a file only when you choose it, open it with Freadly or put it in a folder you told it to watch. It does not go through your storage looking for books.

What cleaning does

Open a typical converted EPUB or a PDF and you will find clutter in the way of a clean read: page numbers in the middle of sentences, running headers, a table of contents that repeats the chapter list, footnote marks, an imprint page, a line of ads for the converter’s website. In a normal reader that is background noise. In an RSVP reader every word is flashed at you, so a page number is a word, and it breaks your attention.

Freadly strips those out when you import a book: page numbers, headers, tables of contents, footnotes, imprint pages and ads. What stays is the text of the book, with chapters kept so you can jump around.

It is heuristic work, so it is not perfect. A strange layout, a scanned PDF with bad text recognition or a book with tricky typography can slip a stray line through. A scanned PDF that is only a stack of page images, with no text layer, has no text to show, so check that you can select text in the PDF before importing it.

The title, author and cover come from the file itself. If the file has none, Freadly can look the book up online by title, author or ISBN, using Open Library, Google Books and Wikipedia. The book itself never leaves your device, only the search words. The option is on by default and you can switch it off in Settings under Library.

Free books inside the app

You do not need your own files to get started. The Market tab in the app searches open libraries and downloads a book with one tap. It then sits in your library, ready to read. Books you already have are marked “In library”.

The sources are:

• Project Gutenberg, the long-running volunteer library of public-domain books, mostly in English but with many other languages.
• Wikisource, the Wikimedia project that collects and proofreads texts in the public domain.

The app asks for the book in EPUB form. For Wikisource that export is done by Wikimedia’s own tool, so the text is what the volunteers proofread.

Both libraries focus on older books whose copyright has expired, which means classics: Austen, Dickens, Wilde, Verne, Pushkin and so on. The App Store text says “thousands of books”, and that is as far as I will go. I do not have a reliable count, and the libraries add books all the time.

A practical word on copyright. Public domain depends on country and date. Project Gutenberg is run from the United States and follows US rules, and a book that is free there may still be protected elsewhere. If you are unsure about a recent author, check before you share a file.

A book is already waiting

Freadly includes “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll, so you can try the reader before importing anything. On a device set to Russian it is “The Captain’s Daughter” by Pushkin instead. It opens from the Library tab. Tap the large word or the play button to start and pause.

Putting it together

Here is a setup that works well for many readers:

1. Pick a classic from the Market, one you half know already. Familiar text is the easiest place to get used to RSVP.
2. Put the books you are actually reading, your EPUBs and FB2s, in a watched folder and import them in one go.
3. Keep articles and PDFs for short sessions. Freadly puts articles in their own “Articles” folder, apart from books.
4. If you read on more than one device and have Pro, switch on iCloud sync. Books, reading positions, quotes and stats then follow you between iPhone and iPad. Sync is a Pro feature.

What about your privacy?

Your books stay on your device. With Pro and iCloud sync switched on they are also stored in your own iCloud account, and they do not pass through Freadly’s server. There is no account to create and no ads. Usage statistics are off until you allow them, and you can switch them off again and delete the data from the settings.

Where Freadly is available

Freadly runs on iPhone and iPad with iOS 26. Reading your own books and the free Market do not cost anything.