EPUB & EPUB3 on Android
An EPUB reader for Android that respects the book
Lectern reads EPUB and EPUB3 the way they were written — verse keeps its line breaks, chapters can open with a drop cap, and footnotes stay where they belong. It reads aloud when you want, and works with no connection.
Lectern is a private EPUB reader for Android. It opens EPUB and EPUB3 files from your own device, renders them with careful, consistent typography, and can read any book aloud with on-device voices. There are no ads, no account and no tracking — the whole app runs offline.
Faithful EPUB & EPUB3 rendering
Most readers flatten a book to fit their own template. Lectern keeps the structure the author set: poetry holds its line breaks instead of stretching to the margin, scene breaks become a small centered ornament rather than a bare grey line, and chapters can open with a proper drop cap. Tables, footnotes and images render in place, and fixed-layout EPUBs display as designed.
- EPUB and EPUB3, including fixed-layout books
- EPUB3 Media Overlays for professionally narrated titles
- In-book table of contents, search and footnotes in a popover
- Page-turn or continuous scroll, full-screen immersive mode
Set it up the way you read
Choose a theme, a font — OpenDyslexic is bundled — and the size, spacing and margins you like, or tap a reading profile to apply a whole look at once. There are one-tap presets for Dyslexia, Standard and Bedtime reading, plus reading tints, brightness and warmth, tap zones and volume-button page turns.
Listen to any EPUB
Lectern is a reader and an audiobook player in one. It reads any EPUB aloud using on-device text-to-speech — your system's voices, or higher-quality Piper and Kokoro packs you can download — and highlights each sentence as it's spoken so you can follow along. For books that ship with narration, it plays EPUB3 Media Overlays, and you can link your own M4B or MP3 audiobook to a title. A sleep timer and ambient sounds round it out.
Study without leaving the page
Highlight in colour, add notes, and look up any word in the built-in WordNet dictionary. Words you save go into a vocabulary list with spaced repetition, and you can share a passage as a quote card. Everything is searchable, per book or across your library.
Read EPUB aloud
- Input
- EPUB, EPUB3
- Feature
- On-device text-to-speech (Piper, Kokoro, system)
- Output
- Spoken audio with sentence highlighting
- Needs
- No internet
Faithful layout
- Input
- EPUB with verse, drop caps, footnotes
- Feature
- Structure-preserving renderer
- Output
- The book as the author set it
- Needs
- No internet
Where your books go
Open EPUB files you already have, or download public-domain titles from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg over the built-in OPDS catalogs. Send a book from another app through the share sheet, or add your own catalog. Missing covers are found for you. Your reading position, bookmarks and highlights sync across your devices through a cloud folder you own — no Lectern account, no server in between.
EPUB reader FAQ
Does Lectern read EPUB3 files?
Yes. Lectern reads both EPUB and EPUB3, including fixed-layout books and EPUB3 Media Overlays for narrated titles.
Can it read EPUB books aloud?
Yes. On-device text-to-speech reads any EPUB aloud with your system's voices or higher-quality Piper and Kokoro packs, highlighting the sentence as it goes.
Does the EPUB reader work offline?
Yes. Reading, read-aloud, highlights and the dictionary all work with no connection. Lectern only goes online for an optional catalog or sync you set up yourself.
Is there a dyslexia-friendly EPUB mode?
Yes. OpenDyslexic is built in and a one-tap Dyslexia preset adjusts the font, spacing and colours together.
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