Lithium: EPUB Reader

A Google user

6 years ago

Great, lightweight app. Never crashes, never loses my page. Books are automatically detected, even when moved around. It doesn't ask for extraneous permissions or waste resources on unwanted features. I just wish I had more control over the naming scheme. Regardless of file name, the display of the titles and authors is beyond my apparent control - and as a result they are inconsistent, which is especially problematic while sorting. This is only somewhat bothersome, though. Usually the metadata is pretty clean.

Anti God

2 years ago

In a lot of ways, it's the best ebook reader on the market, but, as you'll see in many other reviews, text highlighting has a serious bug that causes pages to turn and entire pages to be highlighted when attempting to highlight things in certain areas of the screen, and this occurs across multiple devices and installations. It'd be 5 stars otherwise, and I only keep it installed because it's the only ebook reader that can handle a large library.

A Google user

6 years ago

Five stars - absolutely no complaints, especially considering that this app is free, doesn't annoy you with ads or unwanted upsell or 'please review me' messages. It has a clean interface that is easy to use, finds your books automatically, renders text nicely, and has sufficient customization options so that anybody should be able to find comfortable settings (font, text size, scroll mode, etc.) Very rarely, it will struggle to properly rasterize certain combinations of display orientation/resolution and text size, causing a few letters to be cut off beyond the edge of the screen. However, such incidents are very rare, and can always be ameliorated with some simple adjustment; increasing the margin percentage or tinkering with the font size is usually sufficient. Again, this is rare enough to be inconsequential. This app could benefit from a wider variety of font options, but the ones that are available are certainly adequate, especially considering the $0 price tag. One feature I would like to see added is an option to disable text highlighting - I often find myself accidentally highlighting passages (especially when sleepy and coordination is suffering!). Then, I have to manually remove all the randomly scattered yellow and purple graffiti that makes the book appear to have fallen into the clutches of an underline-crayon-wielding toddler on a mission. (This is absolutely self-inflicted damage, admittedly caused by user error; but, since I never use the highlighting feature intentionally, I would love an additional safeguard against its accidental deployment.) Same goes for the sliding scroll bar at the bottom - it can be easy to accidentally skip way ahead in the book while trying to scroll vertically, if the Android OS misinterprets an intended scrolling gesture as a clicking gesture. I would love to be able to just permanently disable that slider from appearing. Bottom line is that, regardless of those few nitpicks, this app is very good at what it does - to the point where I don't have any interest in testing any potential competitors. Install without hesitation!

Casey Miller

1 year ago

Excellent app. Many thanks to the devs for making this and keeping it free from ads. It's a simple, clean, user-friendly design. I'm reading at least twice as much with this app as I was with my prior setup, which was a combination of physical books and Libby/Overdrive. If you're reading this and on the fence about trying it out, I encourage you to go for it. Try the app for just one book, play with the features, see how you like it.

A Google user

6 years ago

Excellent app. Found my books immediately. I gave this four stars for two reasons. First, the book contents, etc. are on the RIGHT side. When turning pages, you can get that information, which distracts from reading. Second, no dictionary. The pages turn beautifully, except when you get the table of contents by mistake. Taking notes is a breeze, and it appears that copying selected text - for insertion into a school paper, for example, is available, but I did not test it. I really wish there was a dictionary option. Leaving your reading to look up a word - might as well be reading a "real" book. Otherwise, I really like this app for reading epub.

Charles Hawley

4 years ago

Lithium Pro is by far my favorite epub reader app. I have a large collection of epubs and the app handles them with ease. I love the feature of being able to sync my annotations, bookmarks and notes between devices (in my case, a phone and tablet). Only recently, did I discover the ability to export all notes/bookmarks to either a text or HTML file (long press the book itself and touch the three dots in the menu bar) This was a game-changer for me as it was the only real feature I thought Lithium was lacking. The only request I have is the ability to automate the sync between the device and my Google account more frequently than once a day (Is it once a day? It seems like it). Maybe automatically every 2/4/6 hours? Or, additionally, automatically after closing/switching a book? In any event as long as I remember to manually sync my updates, I'm always in sync between my phone and tablet. Great work!

Micah C. Miracle

2 years ago

This app hasn't been updated in nearly 3 years and is still the best. I create and enjoy e-books not only for the convenience of reading, but for the interactive experience. If an element or image should play sound when clicked, this app renders the file correctly. When background images are placed with CSS, this app displays them. It has full screen options without blank spaces. It's controls are simple and powerful. Why is this so hard for other apps to replicate? Interactivity is key!

A Google user

5 years ago

Actually displays epub files correctly on my Samsung phone. Doesn't hurt that the interface is clean and perfectly functional. No ads either. Not sure why the Pro upgrade exists though. Doesn't back up books, only which page you were on and any marks/highlights you may have added. Why bother charging extra for features most people will never miss? Not a criticism against the software, just a weird business decision.

cm bs

4 years ago

I have tried several apps and most overwrite the formatting put into the ebook by the publisher, along with other problems. This is not perfect, but it does the best job of rendering the formatting in the ebook. I appreciate that. Now if only they'd put descriptions of the books in the list, and tags, and get them from the metadata, and from calibre, it'd be almost perfect.

Cosmic Simon

2 years ago

I love this app so much that I got the pro version to support the developers. Now it has this terrible bug where you can't highlight anything without it grabbing a lot of extra text across pages, it is terrible and such an important feature in a ePub reader. I study books, I don't read novels. As soon as they fix is I'll come back and change my review

A Google user

6 years ago

I've been searching for a good reader for my Chromebook since I got it 4 months ago. One major problem that every other reader has is that they do not handle images within the epub document! They either skip them (Google Play Books, I'm looking at you) or simply can't seem to open the file at all. Lithium works incredibly well in this regard, I sort of miss more robust library management that other apps (like Aldiko) have, but I think handling images properly is far more important, especially for my various tech books (and so I can dump the often-bloated pdf docs).

A Google user

5 years ago

Very good! This is an excellent quality e-reader and it's got a nice minimalist interface that doesn't get in the way. I use the Pro version, but it's still missing the single feature that I need most: Backup of epub files to Google Drive. The problem is that a lost phone is still something of a disaster when there's no backup of the epub's themselves. The only other thing it needs badly is background preloading of the next page. Otherwise, it's an excellent reader. Much better than 90% of what's out there.

Dawn Rainier

11 months ago

I loved this app until today. For some reason, every time I tried to open a book, it said it wasn't there, even though it is and was working just fine last night. Had to reset the app and lose all my bookmarks, my folders, everything, and now it won't even refresh and add my books back. Now I'm switching epub readers. So disappointed.

Sydney Bazilian

1 year ago

I downloaded this app specifically because I saw that you can highlight and take notes, and the e-reader I had been using previously didn't have that feature. However, this app's highlighting is very glitchy and frustrating, skipping back and highlighting multiple pages when I just want to highlight a sentence. It makes the highlighter pretty much impossible to use. Once fixed, I'd probably give this app 5 stars.

Neil Tschopp

1 year ago

Great app for the most part. My only complaint is that accurately highlighting a passage can be quite frustrating, as entire pages will often get included when trying to capture the beginning or end of pages. The best, albeit imperfect workaround seems to be changing the font size, but this obviously isn't ideal. If this were to get fixed, the app would be an easy five stars.

Fiona Fitzpatrick

10 months ago

my favorite EPUB reader (for android) I've tried so far but the bug where it highlights entire pages when trying to select text that's at the bottom or top of a page is infuriating and makes it impossible to highlight certain sections. I also wish there was an option for the contents list to include page numbers so you know when each chapter starts without having to check manually.

Ty Ger

10 months ago

I have had this epub reader for a long time and it was one of the best. Even bought pro because I love it. However, recently when I try to open books in the app it says file not found despite having the file. I tried everything I can think of and the only thing that worked was deleting the book from the app (not the device) then opening the book from my files and it worked. Nothing else does and when I try to scan for new books it doesn't find them either. I hope this issue gets fixed soon...