At the E-Gadget help desk we spend a lot of time with installing and explaining apps portable devices. We encounter a lot of book lovers, so we wanted to share our favorite apps for reading.

Health Concerns

Twilight
Twilight is an essential app for anyone who uses a phone or tablet at night. It modifies the color composition of your screen after sunset, shifting the screen’s normal blue light to a red hue. This prevents the blue light of the screen from disturbing your circadian rhythms, making it easier for your to fall asleep after reading at night.

Details

• Free; paid upgrade adds features
   

Book Lovers

Overdrive
Overdrive is a great digital media collection where you can check out E-Books using your Free Library Account. This app will allow you to browse ebooks and audiobooks, check them out, and read them on your device.

Details

• Free
• Requires a Free Library Card Number and Pin and an Adobe ID

FBReader
If you already have ebooks that you’ve purchased or downloaded from Project Gutenberg, FBReader is a great tool for managing and reading them. It’s fast, free, and highly customizable. It can read ePub, rtf, fb2, html, microsoft doc, rtf, and plain text files.

Details

• Free and open-source

Aldiko
If you have a lot of PDFs, Adilko is a handy tool for managing them. It also reads ePub files.

Details

• Free; paid upgrade removes ads and unlocks features

Goodreads
Good Read is a social networking site for book reviews. People can share their reviews, create lists of their favorites, and follow what their friends are reading. The Goodreads app let you look through these reviews and find your next read!

Details

• Free
• Account not required for app usage; creating one will enhance the experience
   

News Junkies

Feedly
Feedly is a news aggregator where you plug in your favorite sites (news sites, blogs, etc) and delivers the latest articles to your device every time you open the app. A great way to keep track a lot of news sites at once! Available on a desktop computer through Feedly’s website.

Details

• Free
• Requires creating a free account

Pocket
Too much clutter? Pocket is a great “save for later” tool for articles, videos, and web pages. If you encounter an article that you like, but don’t have time to read it, you can save it to Pocket, and look at it from the Pocket app in a clean, easy-to-read format. From Pocket’s website you can install a browser extension so you can save articles from your desktop computer.

Details

• Requires creating free account

Circa
In a rush? Circa has you covered. Instead of displaying complete articles, Circa provides contextualized summaries of breaking news stories. It’s designed to look nice on small screens.

Details

• Free
   

For The Adventurous

Too much to read? Try Speed Reading!

In 2014 there has been a number of new apps and websites that use the a technique called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP). This method allows speed reading by presenting words in small chunks as opposed to blocks of text, saving readers the time it takes their eyes search for words on a page. This method has been around since the 1960s, but advances in technology have brought it to the internet in 2014.It’s not for everyone: some people have found you can increase reading speeds without sacrificing comprehension, while experts say it’s less effective than skimming.

A Faster Reader
This is currently the best app for speed-reading articles. From a web browser or app, share an article with A Faster Read, and a box will pop up displaying the article one word at a time.

Details

• Free; paid upgrade unlocks features.
   

Ebook Speed Reader
Looking to speed read .epub and other files? Check out this plugin for FB Reader.