SimplyRead - EBook Reader
Listen or Read or Find Books
Free · In‑App Purchases · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
A book you can read — and listen to.
SimplyRead opens your TXT, EPUB and Markdown files as real books, with covers, chapters and a page worth reading, then reads them aloud in natural iOS voices whenever you would rather listen.
READ
- A reading page set in a proper serif, with five paper themes that follow your phone's Light or Dark mode
- Page by page, or one continuous scroll — whichever you prefer
- Chapters found automatically, including Chinese numeral titles, with a panel to jump anywhere in the book
- Bookmarks, find-in-book with highlighted matches, and a Continue Reading card that puts you back where you stopped
- Every mark and label scales with your text size
LISTEN
- High-quality iOS system voices, at a speed you set
- The sentence being spoken is highlighted, and the page follows along
- Sleep timer, plus Lock Screen, Control Center and CarPlay controls — keep listening with the screen off
BUILD YOUR LIBRARY
- Import from the Files app, create a file straight from your clipboard, or download from a URL and watch it arrive
- Built-in search to find and download books directly to your shelf
- Folders to keep a long shelf tidy
EDIT AND KEEP
- A built-in editor with Find & Replace and a Fix New Lines tool for text files that arrived badly wrapped
- iCloud Drive backup and restore for the whole library, reading positions included
FREE AND PRO
Your own files, the entire reader, themes, chapters, bookmarks and backup are unlimited and free. Pro lifts the daily listening allowance and the download limit.
more - Designed for iPhone Duo: reading, listening, search, and editing adapt to both displays.
- Refined iPad layouts and reader controls make better use of larger screens.
- Search progress stays up to date while a book is playing, with support for Reduce Motion.
- More room for text settings at larger text sizes, with improved VoiceOver feedback in the editor.
- More reliable text cleanup and Markdown reading, including code examples, links, and tables.
5.0.0 2h ago
- optimized UI
4.5.0 3d ago
- A fresh look: Enjoy a redesigned library with illustrated book covers, cleaner search and settings screens, and more compact reader controls.
- Read your way: Choose from four typeface styles and three line-spacing options, with flowing paragraphs and improved English and Chinese typography.
- Follow along more easily: Clearer sentence highlighting and improved auto-scrolling help keep the passage being read aloud in view.
- Smarter text cleanup: Improved line-break repair joins wrapped text while better preserving chapter headings, poetry, and dialogue.
- Easier book discovery: Try suggested titles, retry searches when sources cannot be reached, and enjoy more reliable download cancellation.
- Better accessibility: Improved VoiceOver actions and announcements, layouts for larger text, and support for Reduce Motion.
- More reliable reading: Fixes for losing your place after editing and resuming from the wrong position after seeking on the Lock Screen. The library now refreshes when you return from other apps, with performance improvements for EPUB and Markdown reading.
4.4.0 6d ago
- Keep listening as you browse: The new compact player lets you pause, resume, return to your book, or close it while browsing your library, search, and settings. Leaving the reader keeps playback going, and closing the player saves your place.
- Discover more books: Search now includes Standard Ebooks, with EPUB downloads available directly from search results.
- Better chapter recognition: Improved TXT chapter detection preserves more chapter titles and boundaries, including Chinese novels with missing spaces or line breaks. Searching long chapter lists is smoother, too.
- Richer Markdown reading: Tables display as tables, reference-style links work as links, and read-aloud skips hidden HTML comments and link definitions. Common encoded symbols are read as their characters.
- Find your marks faster: The bookmarks and highlights panel opens near your current reading position. Quoted passages are easier to read on light backgrounds.
- More reliable downloads: Clearer retry status, better handling of interrupted transfers, and improved detection of incomplete downloads and error pages.
- Fixes and polish: Faster loading for EPUB chapters without images, more accurate EPUB links, and fixes for books disappearing after folder renames or losing their place after editing. Deleting a book now stops its playback. Improved large-text layouts, VoiceOver support, and settings controls.
4.3.0 Sep 24
- A Real Browser for Web Results: Tapping a search result now opens a proper browser — a loading bar, Back, Forward and Reload, the page's title over the site it actually came from, and an error page with its reason and a Retry, instead of a blank white sheet. Links that ask for a new tab now open, and a downloaded book keeps the name the site gave it rather than your search query.
- Now Playing, with Progress: The Lock Screen, Control Center and CarPlay finally show how far through a book you are, and the bar can be dragged. Let go while listening and reading carries on from there; drag back a sentence to hear it again.
- Search the Chapter List: Chapters now has a search field for finding a chapter by title, and a Current chapter button that takes you back to your place in the list. Printed contents pages are recognised more reliably, too.
- Better Paged Reading: Bookmarks now appear in the paged views, and a passage taller than the screen can be scrolled instead of being cut off.
- Repair Line Breaks in the Editor: The wand now rejoins prose that was hard-wrapped mid-sentence while keeping blank lines, chapter titles and verse intact — with Undo, and nothing written to the file until you save.
- Downloads and Folders: Pick the folder a download is saved to before it starts, retry a failed download straight from the queue, and move books with a destination picker that says when a folder can't be used.
- Faster and Fixed: A quicker launch, library shelf, chapter list, highlights panel and Find. Plus fixes to the page jumping back while you scrub, blank screens where an error should be, Dark Mode, Go to sentence, iCloud restore, VoiceOver labels and the largest text sizes.
4.2.0 Sep 16
- A New Look: Every book gets a generated cover, titles are set in the reading serif, and the library shelf, search and settings have been redesigned — a shelf of forty text files now reads as forty books.
- Continue Reading: The library opens with a card for the unfinished book you read most recently, showing its cover, progress and a button to pick up where you left off.
- Dark Mode: A book now opens on a dark page whenever your phone is in Dark Mode, not only when you choose Dark by hand. Your saved paper theme comes back in the light.
- Downloads: A download from a URL now shows how far it has actually got, and a failed download can be retried from the queue.
- Find in Book: Matches are now highlighted on rendered EPUB and Markdown pages, not just in plain text.
- Faster & Fixed: Quicker page turns, chapter lists and search results, plus fixes to Chinese numeral chapter titles, swipe-to-delete in the library, dragging the playback scrubber, Find & Replace in the editor, and iCloud restore.
4.0.0 Sep 10
- Chapter Groups: A file holding several books now lists each one as a collapsible group, so you can fold away the works you are not reading.
- Lock Screen Artwork: The Lock Screen, Control Center and CarPlay players now show the app icon while a book is read aloud, instead of a grey placeholder.
- Smarter Language Detection: Books are now sampled from end to end, so a cover page or copyright notice in another language no longer picks the wrong voice.
- Reliable Playback: Fixed a sentence being read twice after Play, a recovery repeating the sentence you just heard, unplugged headphones moving the book to the speaker, and an expired sleep timer cutting the next session short.
- Library & Downloads: Fixed downloads that sat at "0%" until they finished, empty downloads landing as 0 KB books, and files with unusual names importing into a library that never showed them. A fresh install now says it is setting up rather than reporting an empty library.
- Reading View: The end of an EPUB now scrolls clear of the player panel, the page footer follows your text size, and the find bar's Search key works on large books.
- Polish & Accessibility: Consistent colors across toasts, the editor and search fields, more markers that scale with your text size, and various stability fixes.
3.2.0 Sep 3
New
• Books are now read in a voice that can speak their language. Open a book your chosen voice doesn't speak — a Chinese novel with an English voice, or the reverse — and Banana Reader stands in an installed voice that does, for that book only. A notice at the top of the reader tells you the book's language, which voice took over, and where to turn it off. Your own voice choice is never rewritten, and the next book in your language sounds exactly as you set it. There's a switch for the whole feature in Settings.
Fixes
• "Remove bookmark" now removes the bookmark on the first tap, instead of leaving it in place until you tapped again.
• Selecting books and then leaving a folder no longer keeps them selected. Delete and Move could act on books you'd left behind and could no longer see.
• "Clear Reading Progress" now also resets the book you currently have open — it used to be the one book the action missed.
• The reading list no longer pins itself to your place for a second and a half when you reopen a book or jump to a bookmark, chapter, or sentence already on screen.
• The voice notice no longer lands on top of the Find bar. It waits until you've closed the search, then shows with its full time.
• The close button on notices is now a full-size tap target and grows with larger text.
• Cancelling a "Download from URL" now actually stops it — the book no longer turns up in your library a moment later — and a download that's cancelled or refused no longer leaves the file behind.
• Folders now keep their scroll position when the app is closed from the background, not only when you leave the folder.
Accessibility
• VoiceOver can now turn the page in EPUB and Markdown books read page by page.
• The download queue announces each row as one item with its status and progress, keeps reporting the percentage as it changes, and each Cancel button now says which download it stops.
• Five more icons grow with the larger text sizes: Settings section headers, the sleep timer's running card, the premium seal, the allowance rows, and the library tip.
3.1.0 Aug 28
- NEW model: kindle-like reading mode. Can switch between listening and reading in global or each book's settings
- redesigned tool bar
- Epub books now support table of contents
- other improvements and bug fixes
3.0.0 Aug 26
- bug fixes and improvements
2.5.2 Aug 6
- bug fixes and improvements
2.5.1 Jul 29
- bug fixes and various enhancements
2.5.0 Jul 18
- bug fixes and UI improvements
2.4.3 Jul 9
- bug fix and performance enhancement
2.4.0 Jun 19
- bug fix and performance improvements by Fable 5
2.3.2 Jun 13
- improved searching experience
- bug fix
2.3.0 May 30
- optimized searching
2.2.1 Apr 17
- rewrite epub parsing logic
- add button to reset reading progress
2.2.0 Apr 15
- Designed for iPhone Duo: reading, listening, search, and editing adapt to both displays.
- Refined iPad layouts and reader controls make better use of larger screens.
- Search progress stays up to date while a book is playing, with support for Reduce Motion.
- More room for text settings at larger text sizes, with improved VoiceOver feedback in the editor.
- More reliable text cleanup and Markdown reading, including code examples, links, and tables.
more Version 5.0.0 2h ago
Data Not Collected The developer does not collect any data from this app.
