17 Must-Have Free Open-Source Apps for Book Readers for Linux, Windows, macOS, Android and the Web (2024)

For avid readers and book enthusiasts, managing a personal library and tracking reading progress is essential. Book readers and reading trackers can significantly boost productivity by organizing collections, monitoring progress, and providing valuable insights into reading habits.

These tools help keep track of what you've read, what you're currently reading, and what's next on your list, ensuring a seamless and enjoyable reading experience.

In this post, we’ll explore the best 17 free open-source apps that cater to all your book management and tracking needs.

1. Read Journey

Read Journy is an open-source application designed to help you track your reading progress and manage your book collection efficiently. It provides a straightforward interface and essential features for avid readers.

Features

1. Add Books: Easily add books to your collection.
2. Track Reading Progress: Monitor your progress on each book.
3. Organize Books: Sort books into different categories.
4. Reading Statistics: View statistics about your reading habits.
5. Book Reviews: Add personal reviews and ratings for books.
6. Search Function: Quickly find books in your collection.

2. Dante - Book Tracker

Dante, a free open-source book management application designed to help you efficiently track and organize your reading habits.

With its sleek design and robust features, Dante is perfect for book enthusiasts who want to manage their collections and track their reading progress.

Features

1. Add and Organize Books: Easily add books to your collection and categorize them.
2. Track Reading Progress: Monitor your reading progress and update the status of each book.
3. Book Ratings and Reviews: Rate and review books to keep track of your thoughts and preferences.
4. Reading Statistics: View detailed statistics about your reading habits and history.
5. Search and Filter: Quickly find books using the search function and apply various filters.
6. Barcode Scanning: Add books to your collection by scanning their barcodes.
7. Cross-Platform: Available on multiple platforms, ensuring you can manage your library from any device.
8. User-Friendly Interface: Intuitive and sleek design for a seamless user experience.

3. JELU

Jelu is an open-source book tracking application designed to simplify the management of your personal library. It allows you to add books, organize them into collections, and keep track of your reading progress. With Jelu, you can set the status of each book, rate them, and add personal reviews.

The app also supports metadata fetching from external sources to enrich your book details. Its user-friendly interface makes it easy to search and filter through your collection.

Features

• track read books so you don't have to remember everything, and view your history (by year and month)
• manage to-read list
• Import history (from goodreads via csv export or a file with a list of ISBNs, one by line)
• Export your data in a s file
• Import single books manually or automatically via online search (through title, authors or isbn)
• Mark books as currently reading, finished or dropped
• Books can be tagged and a tag page can display all books with that tag
• You can use tags to create custom shelves
• Links to third party providers are fetched online (google books, amazon, goodreads, librarythings) or computed from those providers id you could enter manually.
• Author page with author detail and books from this author
• Auto import author details from wikipedia
• Auto merge authors (to fix duplicates resulting from automatic imports for example)
• Provide embed code snippets so that books can be tracked in other sites, blogs or even markdown notes/journal
• Provide some stats about your readings
• Multi user support (ldap login, proxy authentication, see other user libraries)
• provides an API
• Write reviews and share them, see the reviews of other users on your instance
• Fallback metadata providers
• Metadata import from epub or opf files
• Isbn scanning via camera on mobile

4. Book Tracker

Book Tracker is an open-source application designed to help users manage and track their personal book collections. It offers a user-friendly interface and a robust set of features to keep your library organized and easily accessible.

Features

1. Add and Organize Books: Easily add books to your collection and organize them into categories.
2. Search and Filter: Quickly find books using the search function and filter them by various criteria.
3. Track Reading Progress: Monitor your reading progress and update the status of each book (e.g., reading, completed, to-read).
4. Book Ratings and Reviews: Rate and review books to keep track of your opinions and preferences.
5. Reading Statistics: View detailed statistics about your reading habits and history.
6. Responsive Design: Accessible on various devices with a responsive user interface.

5. Booklist

Booklist, developed by arackaf, is an open-source application designed for easy management of your personal book collection. It provides a straightforward interface to add, organize, and keep track of your books.

With Booklist, you can effortlessly maintain a comprehensive list of your books, making it a practical tool for avid readers who want to manage their collections efficiently.

6. Booktracker

Booktracker is an open-source application designed for managing and tracking your personal book library. Leveraging metadata from Google Books, it allows you to effortlessly add books and organize them into collections.

Users can set each book’s status, rate them, and track the duration it took to read each book, making it a comprehensive tool for book enthusiasts.

Features

• Add books with metadata provided by the Google Books API.
• Add books manually without using an external metadata provider.
• Organize books into collections.
• Create customer reading/ writing challenges and track your progress.
• Write private journal entries about a book.
• View book-related statistics like books read per month, etc.
• Multi-user support.
• Import book data and bookshelves from Goodreads.
• Export data to JSON or CSV.

7. KOReader

KOReader is a powerful, open-source ebook reader that provides a rich set of features and extensive device compatibility. Its support for various ebook formats, customizable interface, and advanced reading tools make it a standout choice for avid readers.

Features

1. Cross-Platform Support: Compatible with multiple devices, including e-ink readers (Kindle, Kobo), Android tablets, and smartphones.
2. Wide Format Support: Reads various ebook formats, including EPUB, PDF, DJVU, MOBI, FB2, and more.
3. Customizable Interface: Offers a highly customizable user interface with adjustable fonts, themes, and layout settings.
4. Advanced Reading Features: Includes features like dictionary support, text-to-speech, annotations, highlights, and bookmarks.
5. Cloud Integration: Sync your library and reading progress across devices with cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive.
6. File Management: Organize your ebooks with built-in file management tools.
7. Plugin System: Extend functionality with a variety of plugins.
8. Performance Optimization: Optimized for low-power devices, ensuring efficient performance on e-ink readers.
9. Community-Driven Development: Open-source project with active community contributions and regular updates.

8. Openreads

Openreads is a privacy-focused, open-source app for Android and iOS, built with Flutter, that helps you track your books. It offers four distinct lists to organize your reading: finished books, currently reading, to-read later, and unfinished books.

Users can add books by searching the Open Library database, scanning barcodes, or entering details manually. The app also supports custom tags for easy filtering and provides insightful reading statistics.

9. Epy

Epy is a free open-source CLI Ebook reader that is built with Python.

Features

• Supported formats:
  • Epub (.epub, .epub3)
  • FictionBook (.fb2)
  • Mobi (.mobi)
  • AZW3 (.azw, .azw3)
  • URL support
• Reading progress percentage
• Bookmarks
• External dictionary integration (sdcv,dictorwkdict)
• Inline formats:boldanditalic(depend on terminal and font capability. Italic only supported in python>=3.7)
• Text-to-Speech (with additional setup)
• Double Spread
• Seamless (disabled by default)

10. Alexandria

Alexandria, developed by btpf, is an open-source ebook manager designed to organize and catalog your digital library with ease. It offers a clean and intuitive interface for managing ebook collections, supporting various formats and providing features such as metadata editing, tagging, and advanced search functionality.

Alexandria aims to simplify the management of large ebook libraries, making it easier to keep track of your digital books.

11. Koodo Reader

This is a free and open-source modern ebook manager and reader with sync and backup capacities for Windows, macOS, Linux and Web

Features

• Format support:
  • EPUB (.epub)
  • PDF (.pdf)
  • DRM-free Mobipocket (.mobi) and Kindle (.azw3,.azw)
  • Plain text (.txt)
  • FictionBook (.fb2)
  • Comic book archive (.cbr,.cbz,.cbt,.cb7)
  • Rich text (.md,.docx)
  • Hyper Text (.html,.xml,.xhtml,.mhtml,.htm,.htm)
• Platform support:Windows,macOS,LinuxandWeb
• Save your data toOneDrive,Google Drive,Dropbox,FTP,SFTP,WebDAV,S3,S3 Compatible
• Customize the source folder and synchronize among multiple devices using OneDrive, iCloud, Dropbox, etc.
• Single-column, two-column, or continuous scrolling layouts
• Text-to-speech, translation, dictionary, touch screen support, batch import
• Add bookmarks, notes, highlights to your books
• Adjust font size, font family, line-spacing, paragraph spacing, background color, text color, margins, and brightness
• Night mode and theme color
• Text highlight, underline, boldness, italics and shadow

12. Calibre-Web

This is an open-source web application that provides a user-friendly interface for browsing, reading, and managing ebooks.

It extends the popular Calibre ebook library management software, offering enhanced accessibility and usability through a web browser.

Features

• Modern and responsive Bootstrap 3 HTML5 interface
• Full graphical setup
• Comprehensive user management with fine-grained per-user permissions
• Admin interface
• Multilingual user interface supporting 20+ languages (supported languages)
• OPDS feed for eBook reader apps
• Advanced search and filtering options
• Custom book collection (shelves) creation
• eBook metadata editing and deletion support
• Metadata download from various sources (extensible via plugins)
• eBook conversion through Calibre binaries
• eBook download restriction to logged-in users
• Public user registration support
• Send eBooks to E-Readers with a single click
• Sync Kobo devices with your Calibre library
• In-browser eBook reading support for multiple formats
• Upload new books in various formats, including audio formats
• Calibre Custom Columns support
• Content hiding based on categories and Custom Column content per user
• Self-update capability
• "Magic Link" login for easy access on eReaders
• LDAP, Google/GitHub OAuth, and proxy authentication support

13. Baca TUI E-book Reader

Baca, developed by wustho, is a minimalist open-source ebook reader focused on simplicity and efficiency. Designed to provide a seamless reading experience, Baca offers a clean and straightforward interface, making it easy to navigate and enjoy your digital books without any distractions.

Features

• Formats supported: Epub, Epub3, Mobi & Azw
• Remembers last reading position
• Show images as ANSI image & you can click it for more detail
• Scroll animations
• Clean & modern looks
• Text justification
• Dark & light color scheme
• Regex search
• Hyperlinks

14. Librum

Librum is an application designed to make readingenjoyableandstraightforwardfor everyone.

It's notjustan e-book reader. With Librum, you can manage your own online library and access it from any device anytime, anywhere. It has features like note-taking, AI tooling, and highlighting, while offering customization to make it as personal as you want!

15. Ebook Reader

Ebook Reader offers a simple and effective solution for managing and reading your ebook collection. Its cross-platform support, user-friendly interface, and compatibility with multiple formats make it an excellent choice for ebook enthusiasts.

Features

• Supports HTMLZ, Plain Text and EPUB files
• Customizable environment (e. g. themes, font size, image blur, furigana settings etc.)
• Continuous / Pagination reader mode
• Vertical / Horizontal reading mode
• Basic Time/Character and Reading Goals Tracker
• Reading Data Statistics
• Character count and progress display
• Table of content support for EPUB files
• (Auto) bookmark functionality
• Auto scroll (continuous mode)
• Book manager
• Data import/export via local and external sources
• Installation and offline capabilities

16. Lector (Linux)

This is a free and open-source ebook reader that supports many ebook formats including PDF, ePub, djvu, mobi, cbr, cbz, md, and more.

17. Librera Reader (Android)

Librera Reader is an e-book reader for Android devices; it supports the following formats: PDF, EPUB, EPUB3, MOBI, DjVu, FB2, TXT, RTF, AZW, AZW3, HTML, CBZ, CBR, DOC, DOCX, and OPDS Catalogs

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