Standard Ebooks Reader
Awards EntryRead beautiful books.
A clean, fast desktop reader for browsing, downloading, and reading beautifully produced public domain books from Standard Ebooks — a volunteer project that typesets classics to a higher standard than commercial publishers. Browse a curated catalogue of thousands of literary works, from Austen to Zola, each with cover art, metadata, and a long-form description. Download books for offline reading with a single click, and build a personal library that lives entirely on your Mac — no account, no cloud, no tracking. The reader is built on foliate-js and supports adjustable text size and a dark mode tuned for late-night reading, alongside light and sepia themes. Your place in each book is saved automatically, and bookmarks let you jump between passages across sessions. Highlight in four colours or underline, and attach margin notes — all stored locally as EPUB CFI references. The catalogue stays current automatically: the app fetches a hosted index on launch and polls the Standard Ebooks new-releases feed weekly, so new titles appear without updates to the app itself.
