pimReader as a Plain Ebook and News Reader

In short: pimReader opens your ebooks and PDFs, finds free classic books, and reads your news feeds. You can switch off all the learning tools.

Your first 10 minutes

On the first screen, tap Just read, no language to learn. Word translations stay off, and you can start learning a language later in Settings.

1. Open your own books. Tap Open a file on Home and pick a book. pimReader reads EPUB, PDF, MOBI, AZW3, FB2, TXT, HTML and Markdown. Pick the file in the list that opens (the Drive & other apps row reaches cloud files). If you see Android's own file picker instead, that works too and needs no permission. You can also open a file from your phone's file manager and choose pimReader. Your library already holds a few sample books: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (English and German) and Les Trois Mousquetaires (French). Open one to see how the page works; you can remove them later.
2. Get free books. Open Feeds on Home. Free book catalogues are already there: Project Gutenberg, ManyBooks, Ebooks libres et gratuits, and a German public-domain library. Tap one, browse or search, tap a book, then tap Read. The book downloads and opens.
3. Turn the learning tools off. In a book, tap Hide Dictionary on the toolbar. This turns off word help for that book. To stop it everywhere, open Settings in the reader. For one book you can also open ⋮ → Book ... and tick Automatically mark new words as known, so its words are not collected as unknown. Under Colors, turn off Highlight unknown words. Under Dictionary, turn off Show translations inline.
4. Make it comfortable. In Settings → Book Font, choose the font, size and line height. In Settings → Colors, choose a scheme such as Sepia or Dark.
5. Keep your place. Select a line and tap Add Note. All your notes are on the Notes page. Tap one to jump back to that place.

A daily routine

• 5 minutes, morning: open Feeds on Home. BBC News and a few others are already there. Tap ⋮ → Add Feed to pick more from the list, or paste a site's address. Coming from another reader? Bring your list with Feeds → ⋮ → Import feeds (OPML). Star an article to keep a copy for offline reading.
• 20 minutes, evening: read your book. Tired eyes? Switch to Night from the menu, or let the phone read aloud. The voice highlights each sentence and turns the pages.
• Once: to use more than one device, open Settings → ⋮ → Cloud Sync & Backup and tick Synchronize with Google Drive. It uses your own Google Drive. No pimReader account is needed.

What it won't do

• It works on Android phones and tablets. iPhone, Mac and Windows versions are coming soon.
• It has no OCR. A scanned PDF opens as pictures of pages, so you cannot select, search or copy the words.
• An MP3 audiobook can play beside the text, but it does not follow your place on the page.

Everything on this page is free. The AI tools are optional, and you never need them for reading, feeds, notes or sync.