Clean Reader

The age of digitization improved many aspects of human life, and, despite the fact that nothing can compare to the feeling of turning physical pages, using the right applications can bring one closer to a comparable experience.

One excellent way of handling ebooks is via Clean Reader’s accessible layout, visually pleasing animations and extra functionality meant to help you learn as much as possible.

One of the most important aspects that developers take into account when designing applications is the quality of the user experience, and Clean Reader does not disappoint in this regard. The program closely follows Microsoft’s latest Fluent Design language by employing minimalist icons, a familiar UWP-inspired layout and smooth animations when transitioning from one section to another.

Boasting a two-pane layout, the app displays the books’ covers and percentage of reading completion, with the option of sorting them by title, time added or reading progress, so that users can quickly find the right novels when browsing through a large collection. Navigating books is done by clicking the horizontal margins or pressing the left and right keys in order to change pages, which is great for both keyboard and mouse-oriented workflows.

For accessibility reasons, one can pick any of the operating system’s fonts and increase the size for displaying text, and the background can be darkened for more pleasant nighttime reading sessions. Multitaskers will be glad to find that the e-book viewer can be minimized into a smaller window that remains on top of other opened programs when making references to various paragraphs.

When reading, one may encounter some passages with multiple expressions that can be deemed worth saving. Thankfully, the application supports highlighting paragraphs or certain words using any color belonging to the RGB spectrum, while also allowing users to add comments that can serve as reminders for looking up the segments later to translate or research their respective topics.

When selecting a portion of text, users can instantly look it up in a new browser window using Microsoft’s Bing search engine, use Google’s translation engine or easily share it with other applications, giving you the freedom necessary for learning new things while reading.

Once added, books’ titles, authors, descriptions and cover artwork can be changed by the user for a highly customized and visually pleasing collection menu. Moreover, one can also open any file in an external program for added flexibility. In order to mask out other background noises for a better concentration while reading, Clean Reader has support for automatically starting up the Ambie white noise app, if installed.

Taking up reading and sticking to this kind of positive habit can be challenging, which is why the app can track your progress and time spent reading for users to identify ways in which they can allocate more hours to it.

Finally, while the program has support for online databases to download books from, it is currently limited to Chinese sources and adding different ones is not straightforward enough for most users.

Those looking for a way to open EPUB files, annotate certain paragraphs and look up various expressions for translation or research purposes can look no further than Clean Reader’s elegant user interface that blends in perfectly with the rest of Windows’ built-in apps based on the Fluent design language.