Shadow Reader: EPUB & PDF

Shadow Reader opens everything on your device — EPUB, PDF, comics, office documents — and reads it aloud in a voice that keeps going when the screen goes off.

No account. No ads. No subscription.

Read every format

• EPUB 2 and EPUB 3

• PDF, with a text layer for search and read-aloud

• MOBI, AZW and AZW3 — DRM-free files only

• Comics: CBZ and CB7

• Documents: DOCX, ODT, RTF, FB2, TXT, Markdown, HTML

Anything that reflows gets your font, your margins and your colours. All of it free.

Listen to any book

Your device's text-to-speech voices turn a book into audio, and the reader follows along.

• Sentence and word highlighting that tracks the voice

• Keeps playing with the screen off, with lock-screen controls and headphone buttons

• Sleep timer, and speed and voice remembered per book

• Come back to the exact sentence the voice stopped on

Read-aloud is free, background playback included.

A library that organises itself

• Watch a folder and new books appear on their own

• Covers, metadata, full-text search across every book

• Shelves, sorting, recently read

• Home-screen widget, quick-settings tile and share-to-open

Highlights, notes and bookmarks

• Highlight in colour, attach a note, bookmark a page

• One hub that shows every book's annotations together

• Export to Markdown, HTML, CSV or JSON — free, and yours to keep

Catalogues

Add any OPDS catalogue — a public-domain library, or your own Calibre-Web, Kavita or Komga — then browse, search and download straight into your library.

Focus, on your terms

An optional reminder after a long stretch, and an optional daily cap. Both are off until you turn them on, and neither ever closes your book.

Reading statistics

Streaks, a thirty-day chart, and time reading kept separate from time listening.

Private by design

Your books stay on your device unless you set up sync yourself. A book cannot phone home — pages are sandboxed off the network. Crash reporting and usage statistics are two switches in Settings, and nothing sent ever carries a book title, a file path or a passage.

Shadow Reader Pro — bought once, not rented

Everything above is free. Pro adds six things:

• Sync — positions, highlights, notes and shelves across your devices, through Google Drive, WebDAV or a folder you choose

• Cloud storage — open books straight from Google Drive, OneDrive, Box or WebDAV

• Voice cast — a narrator, a second voice for dialogue, and up to twelve named characters

• Translation — translate a passage on the device, with no connection

• OCR — read the words off a scanned page

• Automatic weekly backup — backing up by hand stays free

One purchase. It stays bought across your devices and reinstalls, there is no licence check, and there is nothing to renew.

What this app will never do

No ads. No subscription. No paywall on read-aloud, on annotation export, or on a single font, margin or colour. No account needed to open a book.

Formats: EPUB, PDF, MOBI, AZW, AZW3, CBZ, CB7, DOCX, ODT, RTF, FB2, TXT, Markdown, HTML.