Read anything, on anything
Paperback is a fast, fully accessible reader for ebooks, documents and audio books. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android, speaks fifteen languages, and opens over twenty formats. Free, open source, and it collects nothing.
Why Paperback
Built for screen readers
Not retrofitted. Every list, dialog and reading control was designed against NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver and TalkBack, and the whole program works from the keyboard.
Fast on old hardware
Books open in a moment, even the large ones. There is no web view, no framework and no splash screen to sit through.
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, rate and pitch, a sleep timer, and bookmarks that come back to the exact place. Audio books play their own recording instead.
Private by default
No account, no analytics, no advertising. Your library, your place in it and your bookmarks stay on your device.
Yours to change
MIT licensed, with the source, the issue tracker and the translations all in the open.
Platforms
- Windows – installer and portable builds, for x64 and ARM64. Windows 10 and later.
- macOS – signed and notarized, so it opens with no security warnings.
- Linux – AppImage or tar.gz, for x64 and ARM64, with desktop integration so documents open from your file manager.
- iOS – on the App Store, for iPhone and iPad, iOS 17 and later.
- Android – on Google Play, Android 7 and later, with read-aloud that keeps playing in the background.
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.