Freda

Turnipsoft

In-app purchases

About this app

Freda is a free program for reading electronic books (ebooks) on Windows. Read over 50,000 public domain classic books, free of charge, from Gutenberg and other on-line catalogs. Or read your own (DRM-free) books in the supported formats: EPUB, MOBI, FB2, HTML and TXT.

The program offers customisable controls, fonts and colours, plus annotations and bookmarks, and the ability to look up dictionary definitions and translations, and (new feature) text-to-speech reading. Freda understands EPUB formatting information (bold/italic text, margins and alignment) and can display images and diagrams in books.
Freda can get books from on-line catalogs like the Gutenberg Project. Or if you have an existing book collection, you can use OneDrive, DropBox or Calibre to share it with your phone. Freda can also download books from any website and from email attachments.
You can download books and keep them on your phone, so you can carry on reading when you don't have network connectivity.

Freda is a free, advertising-supported app, displaying advertising at the bottom of its main page. If you don't want to see advertising, there is an in-app purchase option to remove it.

The manual is at http://www.turnipsoft.co.uk/freda .

Ratings and reviews

While the extraneous functionality of the app is up to par with other e-readers (backups, synchronization, sourcing and e-catalogs), the actual reading experience is abysmal. Whether it be power requirements, separate development, or poor optimization, Freda on the desktop is a wonderful experience, while the Android counterpart is a choppy, unresponsive mess. FBreader should be something the devs aspire to. Lacking basic font-smoothing? Come on. You can do better. I believe in you. Love, hun

Tried 2 Chinese ebooks (epub and MOBI). I cannot read them with my Note 10. They display correctly on my Windows 10 tablet. Not sure if the root cause is the font or encoding, but I am pretty sure the books are in UTF8. Uninstalled and feel a bit disappointed as I was thrilled of finding Freda in Play Store for continuous reading experience from Windows tablet.

The book I am required to use suggested this app. I haven't tried any other book on this app but my experience has been hard. The pages are broken up. The pages are hard to follow. The app takes time to refresh so when im ready to move on to the next page I have to wait. I do hope, I won't have to use the app again for a digital book.

What's new

+ Switched to using Gutenberg for initial book list (because Feedbooks has been shut down)
+ Improved full-screen mode
+ Fixed issues with background images