Grey Warden

Bookari is a feature rich eReader app that has a lot to offer but is still lacking in key areas. This review covers the Premium version.

 

 

 

- Synchronized bookshelves: Switch between your phone and tablet and always find your books, reading positions, collections, tags, ratings, bookmarks, in their most recent state.

- Supports Adobe and Sony DRM, allowing you to read ebooks protected against hacking

- Customizable Stores section with integrated OPDS browser, and options to add links to your preferred bookstores

- Supports the most common ebook formats (EPUB2, PDF) as well as interactive multi-media books (EPUB3)

 

FLEXIBLE EBOOK READER

- Bookmark pages, highlight or underline text, add notes to a page or to a selected text

- Pin the navigation panel to display your notes next to the text

- Enjoy your PDFs even on smartphones thanks to the advanced PDF support, with lightning-fast vertical and horizontal scroll, Pan & Zoom Advantages of the Premium version - Listen to your books with the vocal synthesis

- Customize the display of EPUB books by creating your own themes, adjusting font, line height, colors, etc.

- Find quickly all occurrences of a word in a book with the advanced search function

- Create your own personalized table of contents by naming your bookmarks

- Create your own tailored lexicon progressively, filled with the words you searched in the dictionary

 

SYNCHRONIZED BOOKSHELVES

- Edit your book details in a very simple way: Title, author, language, publisher

- Organize them in collections, manage their tags and find them instantly with quick access filters (tags, authors, rating...) or with the search function

- Thanks to the synchronization functions, you will retrieve your organization on all your synced devices and even in the website interface of the Cloud

 

ADD BOOKS EASILY

- Browse the preconfigured bookstores or the OPDS catalogs and websites you have added in the “My Stores” section.

- Scan all new books present on your device with the Automatic search

- Connect to your Dropbox account or navigate to a particular file with the Explorer

 

NOTEBOOK

- Retrieve the saved definitions and the notes taken in all your books in the notebook, organize them as in the bookshelves

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Importing books is pretty easy and fast, even from an SD card.  Just select the directory you want to use and you're rolling.

 

 

 

 

 

But before you go any further, in these Data Mining times we live in I suggest first going into the Settings and unchecking this box.

 

 

The first issue I encountered was with the layout.  While it's pretty, it's not practical. Books are sorted by title in either ascending or descending order- not by folder, author or anything else.

 

 

 

The only workaround is to go directly to the folder you want and directly load the book into the app.  This makes no sense whatsoever.  It also doesn't read mobi, cbr, cbz, azw or doc files.  So it's just an epub & pdf reader.

 

When you open a book and tap the arrow at the bottom right corner, a quick list of available features is displayed.

 

 

 

At the bottom of the next screen you can see some of the other features available, including a bare bones audio feature.  Barely adequate for the epub, it's like English spoken by Martians for pdfs.  

 

The Display feature offers four different effects for the screen for your reading enjoyment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Highlight feature is standard.  Comes in different colors and annotations, and also works with the Audio Reader- you can hightlight the text you want and start listening from there... if you can tolerate it.

 

 

 

One handy feature is being able to check your reading progress on recently viewed books and refer to any notes you've made in them. 

 

 

Bookari has a lot of good stuff that's offset by what it lacks.  If you're a strictly epub/pdf person, or don't need much customization for your files this'll do ok.  If not, shop around for something else.

 

3.5/5