Reader

My books arrive in four shapes. A publisher's EPUB, a PDF someone scanned out of a 1940s hardback, a Word manuscript a friend sent me, a text file off a mailing list. Four apps, four ideas of where I stopped reading, four places my highlights lived. The scanned one was not text at all, only pictures of pages, so I could not search it, highlight a line or make the type bigger. Two of those apps wanted an account before they would open a file that was already sitting on my phone.

• One shelf for four kinds of file EPUB, PDF, Word documents and text files all land in the same library and read the same way afterwards. What a file is gets worked out by looking inside it, so a wrong or missing extension does not matter, and importing the same book twice does not give you two of it.
• Read aloud with the page following Pick a voice and it reads to you. The sentence being spoken is tinted, a marker slides along under the words, and the page turns only once the words have left it. Turn a page by hand and it stops chasing you; one button puts you back with the voice.
• Highlights that survive a change of type Marks are held against the words, so changing typeface, size, line spacing, margins, colour scheme or the way you are holding the device never moves them.
• Scanned pages become text you can use Read the pages of a scan and the book is rebuilt as text, after which it re-wraps, searches, highlights and can be read aloud like anything else. The original pages are kept, because reading words off a picture is a lossy business and you may want to check it.
• Two ways to read a PDF Text that re-wraps for prose, or the original fixed pages for tables, forms and anything whose meaning is in its arrangement. The choice is per book and changes only what you look at: chapters, notes and search all survive the switch.
• Notes that outlive the app Every book you have annotated is written out as its own text file, quotes and notes in the order they appear in the book, somewhere you can reach from outside the app. Everything else goes when the app goes.

A mark belongs to the words it covers, not to the spot on the screen where it happened to land. So the app remembers the words you marked and nothing about how the page looked when you marked them. Turn the type up, widen the margins, switch to dark, rotate the tablet, and every highlight is still on the same sentences and you are still on the same words. The place you stopped works the same way, which is why changing the type size does not lose your page. The other decision was to make going online impossible rather than optional. Nothing in the app can open a connection, and I check the finished app for one instead of trusting myself to remember.

It is not in any store. I put it on my own phone myself and read on it every day. Two things I know are wrong. Pictures inside a PDF do not survive the text being re-wrapped: a figure ends up at the top of the page it came from rather than where it sat, and plenty do not come through at all, so reading that book as its original pages is the answer for now. The other is following along with an audiobook you supplied yourself. The app knows where each track begins and guesses between those points, so it drifts by a sentence or two. Narration it speaks itself is exact, because it knows which sentence it is saying. Closing that gap is what I am on next.