Read anything, on anything
Paperback is a fast, fully accessible reader for ebooks, documents and audio books. It opens over twenty formats and speaks fifteen languages. Windows, macOS and Linux are free downloads. The iOS and Android apps are paid, and the source is MIT licensed if you would rather build them yourself.
Why Paperback
Screen readers come first
Not retrofitted. Every dialog and reading control was built against NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver and TalkBack, and nothing in the program needs a mouse.
Fast on old hardware
Books open in a moment, even the large ones. Nothing is rendered in a browser engine unless you ask for it, with Ctrl+Shift+V.
Navigate like a browser
Move by heading, link, page, table, list or formula with single keys, the same way your screen reader moves through a web page.
Read aloud
Your own voice, at the rate and pitch you set, with a sleep timer and bookmarks that come back to the exact second. Audio books play their own recording instead.
Private by default
No account and no analytics. Your library and your place in it stay on your device.
Yours to change
MIT licensed. The source and the translations are in the open, and you can build it yourself.
Platforms
- Windows – free. Installer and portable builds, for x64 and ARM64. Windows 10 and later.
- macOS – free. Signed and notarized, so it opens with no security warnings.
- Linux – free. AppImage or tar.gz, for x64 and ARM64, with desktop integration so documents open from your file manager.
- iOS – paid, on the App Store, for iPhone and iPad running iOS 17 or later.
- Android – paid, on Google Play, Android 7 and later, with read-aloud that keeps playing in the background.
Buying the mobile apps is what pays for the work. If you would rather not, the source is public and builds for both.
Formats
- Comic book archives (.cbz)
- CHM help files
- DAISY books
- EPUB
- FB2
- HTML
- Manual pages (man and mdoc)
- Markdown
- Microsoft Word (.docx, .doc, and Word 6 and 95)
- M4B audio books
- MOBI, AZW and AZW3 (Kindle)
- MP3 audio books
- OpenDocument text and presentations
- PDF, including scanned PDFs through OCR
- PowerPoint (.pptx, .ppt)
- reStructuredText
- RTF
- Windows Write (.wri)
- WinHelp (.hlp)
- Plain text and log files
Languages
- Bosnian
- Chinese (Simplified)
- Czech
- Dutch
- English
- Finnish
- French
- German
- Japanese
- Polish
- Portuguese (Brazil)
- Russian
- Serbian
- Spanish
- Ukrainian
- Vietnamese
Want to add your language? Read the translation guide.