WatchReader

Ying Wang

About this app

WatchReader turns a Wear OS watch into a small, quiet e-book reader.

Add a .txt or .epub on the phone, tap it, and it is on the watch a moment later. Pages are laid out for the round screen with a real measurement of your font and size, so nothing is cut off at the edges. Turn the crown or tap the sides to flip pages; your place is kept and shown on the phone as well.

Or let the page turn itself, at a pace you set.

Long-press a page to have the watch read the book aloud. Reading continues with the screen off and after you leave the app, with a pause and stop control in the notification. Each sentence is read in the voice of its own language, across 26 languages from Chinese and English to Japanese, Russian, French, German and Czech; a voice the watch is missing is downloaded the first time a book needs it, wherever the speech engine offers one.

The phone also keeps a quiet note of how long you read: today's total at the top of the library, the last seven days on a page of their own, and for each book when you added it, first opened it and finished it, how long you have spent on it and, once there is enough to go on, roughly how long is left. Watch, phone and listening are counted separately. There are no goals, streaks or reminders, and the numbers stay on your devices.

Features
• .txt and .epub, in UTF-8, GBK or GB18030 - encoding is detected on the phone
• Pagination measured against the actual screen, with breaks at sentences and paragraphs
• Rotary crown and tap navigation, jump to any percentage
• Automatic page turning at a pace you set
• Read aloud as a background service, with sentence highlighting
• Sans, serif, and a bundled Kai calligraphic face, dark or sepia page
• Share a file to WatchReader from any app, or paste a link
• No account, no ads, no analytics; books never leave your devices
• Read on the phone as well, with your place kept in step between phone and watch
• Reading time on the phone: today, the last seven days and each book, with watch, phone and listening counted apart

Requires a phone running the companion app and a watch on Wear OS 3 or later.

What’s new

Reading time. The library now opens with today's date and how long you have read today, on the watch and the phone, and from there the last seven days; each book's menu has Details with its dates, time spent and time left at your pace. The page can be dark, light or sepia, and the library follows dark mode. Contents opens at the current chapter and can jump by percentage. Your place on the watch is picked up here, and many books that failed to import now come in cleanly.