BookMapper PDF Reader
Essential book-studying tool
Only for Mac
Free · In‑App Purchases
BookMapper is a one-of-a-kind app, as there is no other tool that does what it does. If you frequently work with PDF ebooks in your study or job, BookMapper can help you become more productive by giving you a new level of power over how you interact with your books.
What makes BookMapper unique:
1) Highly-responsive page-flipping to simulate physical books, which enables you to browse the book rapidly in a visually comfortable way. This greatly increases your sense of navigational control over the book, compared to the ubiquitous page-scrolling method of other PDF readers,
2) All the standard PDF tools (bookmarks, table-of-contents, search, etc) are presented in a popup layer so that you can browse their pages WITHOUT affecting your reading layer. This ensures that you do not have to switch away from your current reading page whenever you need to view the pages associated with the PDF tools, unlike other PDF readers.
3) When you are reading your book, and encounter a reference to a figure located somewhere else in the book, you can click the reference to automatically popup the page to display the figure. You do not need to manually browse the book to locate the figure, and causing you to lose your current reading page.
4) When you are reading an academic paper, and encounter a citation to an item in the references list of the paper, you can click the citation to popup the item. You do not need to manually scroll to the references list, and causing you to lose your current reading page.
5) When you perform a search on your book, the search results will not be replaced when you later perform another search. This allows you to retain multiple sets of search results, which is useful when you need these different results to be simultaneously available to support your work.
6) BookMapper remembers the page you were reading so that whenever you return to the app, any book you open will automatically open at the previous page you were viewing during the last BookMapper session.
7) If your book is a textbook containing an Index section, BookMapper can turn the Index section into a powerful tool where you can simply click on an index item to popup the set of relevant pages mentioned in the item. This allows you use the Index section to browse for relevant pages, without losing your current reading page.
8) BookMapper lets you annotate beyond the traditional page-level annotations: You can use “maps”, which are documents at a higher-conceptual level, to express whatever additional information you want about your page-level annotations. Using this approach, you can create higher-level annotations that span across multiple PDF files, which is something you will appreciate when you need to capture notes involving multiple research papers, for instance.
When you open a PDF file with BookMapper, the book that is created from that file will expire after 30 days. After the book expires, you can delete it and re-open the same PDF file to create a new book to continue reading it if you wish. However, any maps you might have created for the deleted book would be lost. If you decide to keep the maps you have created for that book, then instead of deleting the expired book, you need to remove its expiration so that you can continue working on its maps. Removing a book's expiration requires a subscription via in-app purchase.
If you are not planning to use maps, then subscription is not necessary, and you can simply use BookMapper as a preferred PDF reader because of its sheer power over conventional PDF readers. After you have personally experienced these unique strengths of BookMapper to read your PDF files, you will find it hard to return to using conventional PDF readers!
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more Version 2.10.6 is a bug fix release addressing two issues:
1) In certain user environments, the app can sometimes erroneously display at two times the intended scale
2) App loses stability and may crash when dragged to a different monitor in a multi-monitor configuration
2.10.6 10/17/2025
Version 2.10.5 added some minor UI improvements:
1) Vertical scrolling of pages is now smoother - when the mousewheel is gently turned, the pages can now be vertically shifted by smooth continuous motion instead of shifted by discrete jumps
2) Highlight colouring has been improved
This version also fix some minor bugs, including the bug that causes the app to hang when items on the Recent Search list are deleted.
2.10.5 10/03/2025
Version 2.10.4 fixes some minor bugs, together with a more severe regression that causes pages to be rendered less clearly on certain computers with lower resolution displays.
Other than bug fixes, this version introduced the following new features:
1) Ability to resize the app window.
2) Ability to change the background color of book pages
3) In previous versions, the pages can only be worked with (for instance, to create annotations or to select hotspots) when they are displayed as continuously-scrollable pages. This restriction is now lifted, in other words, these actions can now also be performed on pages that are displayed in 2-page book view.
4) The magnifying glass feature has been improved; it can now remain permanently onscreen without keeping the mouse pressed down, thereby making it easier to use.
2.10.4 08/26/2024
Version 2.10.2 fixes a number of minor bugs, and introduces these important new features to improve usability:
1) In previous versions, switching between windows containing the different opened books was somewhat confusing to new users unaccustomed to the "adventurous" mobile-oriented UI design we adopted. In this version, we have switched to the conventional tab arrangement of desktop applications that most users are familiar with.
2) In previous versions, the panel for accessing standard toolbar functions (such as bookmarks, search, etc) was presented differently depending on whether one was viewing the PDF file as a book or as vertically-scrollable pages. This caused some visual confusion when switching between the two views. In this version, a common toolbar panel is used for all views, thereby greatly improving the visual coherence when switching views.
3) The toolbar now includes a “Link” button that can be used to discover all the weblinks and annotation links in the PDF book
4) When viewing the PDF as a book view, holding down the mouse button will popup a magnifying glass that shows more clearly the image surrounding the mouse cursor.
5) Instead of having to repetitively click the UI navigation buttons to perform multiple page flipping, the same effect can now be achieved by doing a long press on these buttons.
6) Support for manipulating the book via the keyboard has been added; eg, the arrow keys on the keyboard can now be used to perform page flipping.
2.10.2 07/17/2024
Version 2.9.0 introduces the option for the two-page book view to be displayed in "full-screen" mode, where the book can now occupy the entire application screen instead of always sharing the screen with the tool view. With this option, the user can now choose to display the book in a larger size to make it easier to read small text on the book.
Also, some UI functions have been moved to the application main menu for those who prefer the classical approach of invoking functions through the main menu rather than through UI widgets.
This version also fixes a number of minor bugs.
2.9.0 04/02/2024
This version fixes a showstopper bug which causes the app to render at double the correct scale on macOS 14 (Sonoma).
2.8.1 02/16/2024
Version 2.8.0 improves upon the very useful concept of “popup layer” first introduced in version 2.7.0. In that earlier version, popup layers are available only when viewing the book in vertically-scrollable single-page mode. With this new version, the concept of popup layers has been generalised to the 3D page-flippable book view.
With this new generalised treatment of popup layers, the appearance of the navigation bar can now remain the same when switching between scrollable single-page view and book view, since both view types now support popup layers. This new behaviour of the navigation bar helps reduce confusion when toggling back-and-forth between view types.
Another change relates to the toolbar functions. With version 2.8.0, all toolbar functions available during single-page view is now also available during 2-page book view. Hence the toolbar now appears identical in both view types since they both share identical toolbar functions.
Version 2.8.0 also fixes a number of bugs, including the following:
1) Inability to flip book pages using mouse-wheel in certain situations
2) Sporadic inability to expand or contract windows
3) When contracting a book window displaying a thumbnail view, the view disappears
4) When switching book windows using the window button, the new book window is sometimes unresponsive
2.8.0 02/05/2024
Version 2.7.3 introduces improved graphics performance for page-flipping and transitioning between views of the book. This version also fixes a number of bugs, including the following:
- inability to display newly created annotations
- inability to terminate annotation-editing after the annotation has been dragged to a new position.
2.7.3 11/13/2023
This version fixes a bug where the app is displayed in overly large size on Mac OS Sonoma, causing part of the app's visual content to fall outside the app window and thereby becoming unreadable.
2.7.2 10/11/2023
This version introduces a significantly improved book navigational model from the previous versions. This new version has been redesigned to ensure that the user does not lose his current reading page when he needs to explore other pages associated with tools (such as bookmarks, search, table-of-contents, etc.). To achieve this, the UI for book reading has been re-implemented to provide a reading layer for normal book reading, and a popup layer for exploring other pages associated with tools.
2.7.1 09/26/2023
With this release, BookMapper now supports the reading of password-protected PDF files.
This release also fixes some bugs, including the following:
- If the app's book window is expanded before any book has been opened, attempting to open a book causes an error preventing the book from being displayed in the expanded window..
- When the app is run on screens with very high-resolution (such as 4K monitors), the app fails to display the windows properly when entering Browse Windows mode
- On certain screen resolutions, when the book is displayed in a two-page view, the right page is rendered less sharply than the left page.
2.6.3 02/13/2023
This release introduces the following improvements:
- Page contents are rendered with sharper text for better readability
- Auto-detection of locations in pages that permit jumping to a different page (such as locations in Index pages and Table of Contents pages)
- Auto-detection of URL links in pages, which when clicked will launch the browser to the corresponding webpage
This release also fixes some bugs, including the following:
- Fixed the inability to close the startup screen when clicking the close (X) button
- Fixed the unresponsive behaviour of the submenus in context menus
- During Page View, when the page contains selected text, clicking the Search button will now display the Search dialog box to allow the user to confirm proceeding with the search, instead of the previous behaviour of running the search using the selected text (which is generally not the user's intention).
2.6.2 02/02/2023
This release fixes a showstopper bug that causes the images of book pages on certain computers to appear garbled.
Some other bugs related to displaying on high-resolution screens have also been fixed, including:
- the incorrect aspect ratio of the application screen.
- the incorrect positioning of popup menus on these computers.
- the inability to flip multiple pages when repeatedly clicking the page navigation buttons.
Finally, the name of the app has been changed to BookMapper PDF Reader to better convey the fact that BookMapper is also a very accomplished PDF reader for those users searching for a PDF reading tool before taking the plunge to explore the unique additional capabilities offered by the app.
2.6.1 12/01/2022
This release introduces the following changes:
1. The process of linking annotations from a page to a map is now much easier than before: You can now simply drag the annotations and drop them onto a map. Compared to the previous dialog-based approach, the new drag-and-drop approach provides important visual feedback that makes working with maps more intuitive and easy.
2. The old video tutorials have been removed. BookMapper is now bundled with a new Sample Map Document that also serves as a self-learning tool. This sample document not only explains the advantages of using maps, it also includes interactive exercises to help you learn how to get started with maps.
3. All sample books and map documents bundled in the app have been updated.
4. General improvement of UI and messaging to make the app easier to work with.
5. The startup welcome screen has been changed. It now includes a listing of recently-used books and maps, to make it easier for you to open the items you were working on during the previous session.
Bug Fixes:
A number of issues and bugs have been resolved.
2.6.0 10/27/2022
This release introduces the following changes:
1. Change of terminology: The term “guest book” is now replaced by the term “trial book”, to better convey the fact that trial books come with an expiration date. This terminology change does not alter the requirement that in-app-purchase is needed to remove the trial status of a book, i.e., to convert a trial book to a book that never expires.
2. You can now automatically reopen a book at the page you were last reading before the book was closed. This is very helpful to let you continue your book reading across app sessions without you having to remember where you left off. Together with this, books are now also open in Page View where the displayed page is zoomed-in at the last remembered zoom level.
3. When reading a book, we very often need to be able to jump to another part of the book to look at something else, without losing the current page which we intend to return to later. There is now automated support for this (called “saving return pages”), making it far easier to study books that require constant jumping back and forth to look at diagrams, definitions, references, indexes, etc while reading.
4. The common tools (Search, Bookmarks, Table of Contents, etc) are now directly accessible when reading the book in zoom-in mode (aka Page View) without having to first exit Page View. This is a welcome improvement because most of the intense reading is usually done while in Page View.
5. The name of the book currently open is now echoed in the app’s main window, making it visually clear which book is being read.
Bug Fixes:
1. Fixed some issues associated with the Book Search facility, including the error that occurs when deleting a search result
2. Fixed the problem where the Recent Book menu item fail to display more than 1 recent items
3. Fixed other minor bugs
2.5.0 09/22/2022
This release fixes a few minor bugs.
2.4.1 07/13/2022
This release introduces the following changes:
1) Each Guest Book opened in BookMapper can now enjoy the same privilege as Empowered Books for 30 days! In previous versions, maps that users create for guest books are not saved when the app closes. This restriction is now removed by equipping each guest book with an expiration period of 30 days. Before a guest book expires, it behaves exactly like an empowered book, implying that maps created by users for the guest book will persist across app sessions. This relaxation on guest books’ behaviour is to let users who have not taken up the app subscription to enjoy BookMapper’s mapping facilities for books that they only need to work on for short periods.
2) Minor bug fixes
2.4.0 05/26/2022
This release introduces the following changes:
1) An improved UI organization for common functions — Search, Bookmarks, Table of Contents, etc — which are now presented as menu options on the screen’s left column for fast invocation of functions.
2) A much-improved organization for maps: To avoid proliferation of many single maps, maps are now created as part of documents. This improvement is consistent with how users approach the task of annotating books, where multiple maps are created as part of a single project in mind.
3) As a result of point 2, all document’s maps are now displayed for fast selection on a screen’s left column — similar to point 1 — so that a common UI feel is achieved.
4) The previous concept of “dashboard” has been removed, and the dashboard functions are now seamlessly integrated into the improved UI. Also, the previous terminology “atlas” is no longer used, as that role is now assumed by the “document” mentioned in point 2.
5) The video tutorials have been updated to cover new material.
6) General bug fixes.
2.3.0 05/05/2022
This release introduces the following changes:
1) Improvement to the book navigation experience, where the UI of some common functions — namely Search, Bookmarks, Table Of Contents, etc — have been streamlined to give them a more similar method of operation.
All these functions now support a similar ability to display a preview of the selected page, together with the option to then flip the book to that previewed page. In addition, some of these functions’ UI appearance have been simplified to remove features that are not important to the core purpose of the functions, making the simplified UI easier to use.
2) The Search function has been optimised and now executes faster.
3) A more recent version of the 3rd party PDF library has been bundled with the app.
4) Minor bug fixes.
2.2.0 03/18/2022
This release introduces two performance improvements that contribute to a much better book browsing experience:
1) Rendering of page images is now much faster owing to a rewrite of the PDF-loading algorithm. As a result, the occurrence of displaying unloaded pages during rapid page browsing has been largely reduced.
2) Scrolling of thumbnail view is now much smoother and more responsive.
2.1.1 03/05/2022
This release adds support for continuous scrolling when viewing zoomed-in pages, where mouse wheeling now results in the view scrolling slightly to adjacent pages rather than causing a complete page change. This new behaviour makes reading across page boundary more comfortable, since the page transition can now by finely-controlled using the mouse-wheel or the scrollbar.
This release also includes some minor bug fixes. One such fix is preventing the visually distracting flashing that sometimes occurs during initial page zoom-in.
2.1.0 02/02/2022
Version 2 comes with valuable and useful changes:
1) The approach for creating maps has been completely revamped. Map creation is now much easier and more intuitive than before.
2) Overall UI improvement, resulting in a smoother user experience.
2.0.1 01/10/2022
Version 2 comes with valuable and useful changes:
1) The approach for creating maps has been completely revamped. Map creation is now much easier and more intuitive than before.
2) Overall UI improvement, resulting in a smoother user experience.
2.0.0 01/09/2022
Performance improvements, including better caching strategy to support rapid page browsing.
Minor bug fixes, related to zooming of pages and a few others.
Minor amendments to the bundled user guides.
1.0.6 06/14/2021
Fixed a bug that prevented selection of a new Guest book.
1.0.5 06/06/2021
Version 2.10.6 is a bug fix release addressing two issues:
1) In certain user environments, the app can sometimes erroneously display at two times the intended scale
2) App loses stability and may crash when dragged to a different monitor in a multi-monitor configuration
more Version 2.10.6 10/17/2025
Data Not Collected The developer does not collect any data from this app.
