Android eBook Reader / ePub Apps

Yes, Android works rather good as an eBook reader. I love reading before I fall asleep and using night mode (black background, light letters) is great. It’s also kind of nice that you can read with just one hand because you don’t have to flip pages with your other hand. Reading PDFs can be a bit of a hassle but the open ePub format has great readers and it is easy to convert pretty much every format to ePub.

Android eBook Apps
Right now the Android market has two main eBook / ePub Apps and judging by the high demand for eReader there will be plenty more.

Aldiko
The first and my absolute favorite is Aldiko (and its very likely you will like it too). This is a very well done application and you can browse your ePub books on a virtual bookshelf (like on the iPad). The reading options are highly customizable so you can set your own font, font size, color, background color and much more. You can also freely customize how to flip pages but the default setup is already pretty good. You can flip pages with the touchscreen or the volume buttons for example.

Another great and pretty much a must have feature is the ability to change the brightness of the screen. I love reading books for hours and a too bright screen is bad for your eyes so I have the screen always on minimal brightness for reading.

The only thing I’m missing is an autoscroll option but the guys at Aldiko seem to know what they do so I’m quite optimistic they will add this and make this great app even better.

FBReader
FBReader is an open source eBook reader with a long history on various operating systems. The Android version supports unlike Aldiko several formats such as .oeb or .fb2. You can also customize the fonts but not the navigation. The brightness of the screen is also not adjustable. FBReader is great for other formats but for ePub right now, nothing beats Aldiko.

Important Settings
Essential things you should do for the sake of your eyes is to increase the font size to something that is easy for you to read and make sure that there isn’t such a strong contrast between the letters and the background. That’s the same you should do on any kind of screen if you read a lot on it.

What to do with PDFs?
There are very few free and good PDF readers for Android right now. People who want to shell out some money can have a look at BeamReader which is considered pretty much the best PDF reader for Android at the moment.

But here are the good news! There is Calibre, a very popular free eBook conversion software that lets you convert more or less any format to the ePub format.

Where do I get eBooks?
Besides some forums and websites in which you can find free books, many other file sharing sites can be sources of books. Keep in mind you can convert pretty much every format to ePub and that’s in my opinion the way to go because I wouldn’t want to miss all the ePub app options that makes reading for hours easy on the eyes.

So here you go, that’s my lowdown on Android eBook apps as of February 2010. Getting into this saved me the last trip to a bookstore and I just started reading the first book of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series on my phone.