Best Free EPUB Readers for Android in 2026 (Honest Picks by Use Case)

Most customisable: Moon+ Reader. Free with ads; Pro is a one-time purchase. Cloud sync, every format, a setting for everything.

Simplest, no ads, no account: ReadEra. Opens almost anything, clean, quiet; highlights and notes need the paid Premium tier.

E-ink and power users: KOReader. Open source, phenomenal on e-readers, not on Google Play, and the interface shows it.

Studying — highlights into flashcards, workbooks, encrypted library: GemReader. Free with no paid tier, no ads, no telemetry; EPUB, PDF, Kindle formats and CBZ comics; no cloud sync. We make it.

Pick by the thing you do most. Fiddle with settings and sync across devices: Moon+. Just open the file and read: ReadEra. E-ink device or DjVu: KOReader. Read to learn and want highlights to become a study deck without exporting anything: GemReader. None of them is wrong; three of them are wrong for you.

GemReader is our app. That makes any 'best of' list from us suspect, so the rule here is simple: every app gets its strongest case and its real weaknesses, including ours, and the recommendations are by use case rather than a ranking. If you leave this page and install Moon+, the page did its job.

The veteran. Moon+ has been on Android since 2010 and opens essentially everything: EPUB, PDF, MOBI, AZW3, FB2, CBZ/CBR, TXT, HTML and more. It syncs reading position and highlights through Dropbox, Google Drive or WebDAV, supports OPDS catalogs, and has text-to-speech with lock-screen controls.

The customisation is the selling point and the complaint. Themes, page-turn animations, per-corner tap actions, margin and line-spacing sliders, gesture maps — it is all there, and finding the setting you want is a hobby in itself. The free version shows ads; Moon+ Reader Pro removes them and adds a few features for a one-time price.

Choose it if you want cloud sync, FB2/TXT/CBR files, or deep control. Our full comparison is at Moon+ Reader alternative.

ReadEra's pitch is that it just works: no account, no ads in the free version, opens EPUB, PDF, MOBI, AZW3, DjVu, FB2, DOCX, TXT and CBZ, and gets out of the way. Library scanning is automatic and the reading view is clean.

The limits show once you want to do more than read. Highlights, notes and cloud sync are in ReadEra Premium, a paid tier. There is no text-to-speech and no spaced repetition. If reading is a passive activity for you, none of that matters and ReadEra is an excellent default.

Librera Reader is open source, opens the same broad range of formats as ReadEra plus DjVu and comics, has text-to-speech, and offers a 'musician mode' auto-scroll that nothing else does. The free version on Google Play shows ads; the Pro build removes them, and an ad-free build is available on F-Droid.

The interface is functional rather than polished, and the settings, while fewer than Moon+, are scattered. Highlights and notes exist but export awkwardly. It is the right choice if you want open source and format breadth without KOReader's learning curve.

KOReader is open source, built first for e-ink devices, and the best reader on the list for PDF and DjVu reflow, dictionary lookup with your own StarDict files, and precise typography control. It runs on Android phones too, and on Kobo, Kindle (jailbroken), PocketBook and reMarkable.

It is not on Google Play — install from F-Droid or GitHub — and the interface was designed for e-ink refresh rates and physical buttons, which feels alien on a phone. No ads, no account, no telemetry. Highlights export to text, and there is a plugin ecosystem for those willing to dig.

Lithium does one thing: EPUB, rendered cleanly, with a small settings sheet and highlights in four colours. It is fast, free, ad-free in the base version, with a Pro purchase for themes and a couple of extras. No PDF, no other formats, no TTS, no sync.

If every book you own is an EPUB and you want the least app possible, Lithium is that. If you have a single PDF, it isn't.

GemReader is built around the read-mark-review loop. Highlight in one of six colours, type a note, and it is a card on a built-in spaced-repetition Review page — no export, no second app. Existing Anki decks (.apkg, .txt) import and drill in the same queue. Interactive EPUB workbooks save your answers in text fields and checkboxes automatically, and it implements the full EPUB 3.3 spec so textbooks render as their publishers built them. Highlighting works on PDFs as well: mark a passage in a lecture PDF and it becomes a card like any other, labelled with its page in your gems and in Markdown and Anki exports. Fillable PDF forms keep their answers too.

It opens EPUB, PDF, MOBI, AZW, AZW3 and CBZ comic archives in one library, and the free-books catalog includes two curated public-domain Golden Age comic collections. Every book is AES-256 encrypted on import; PIN-locked folders hide sensitive reading and wipe after three wrong guesses. There is no account, no ads, no paid tier and no analytics or crash reporting of any kind. Free books from Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks and Wolne Lektury download in-app, and text-to-speech reads any chapter aloud. Comics show a page counter and a scrubber, and a manga marked right-to-left turns its pages that way.

The weaknesses: no FB2, DjVu, CBR or TXT; no cloud sync — moving to a new device uses Gem Beam, a direct encrypted transfer between two phones, rather than a continuous sync; Android 10 or newer only; and far fewer display settings than Moon+. Not sure whether a file will open? The free Book Checker reports DRM and corruption in the browser without uploading anything. What it does not do is lock you in: a backup can be a plain ZIP of your book files that any other reader opens.

Kindle purchases with DRM: none of these. Only the Kindle app opens them. Check a file with the Kindle DRM Checker before assuming otherwise.

Comics and manga: Moon+, ReadEra or Librera for .cbr archives; GemReader, Moon+, ReadEra or Librera for .cbz. Reading textbooks and lecture PDFs for an exam: GemReader. E-ink tablet: KOReader. Strictly no ads and no paid tier at all: GemReader, KOReader or Librera's F-Droid build. Read on phone and tablet with position in sync: Moon+ Pro or ReadEra Premium.

Privacy: KOReader and GemReader ship no telemetry. Moon+, ReadEra and Librera's Play builds include ad or analytics SDKs in their free versions; check each privacy policy for current specifics.

If your reading comes with an exam attached, GemReader is the one on this list made for it. Textbooks, lecture PDFs and workbooks in one library; highlight as you read, then study those highlights as flashcards — without exporting anything or leaving the app. Free, no ads, no account. Download for Android.