Open Call for Accessible, Real Book Reading App on Mac

There is currently no truly effective book reading solution available for Mac users. Whether reading for academic purposes or leisure, readers often require features such as highlighting, bookmarking, word lookup, and copying selected text. Unfortunately, most Mac-based book reading apps fall short in these essential areas.

For instance, highlighting or bookmarking in many apps is limited to entire paragraphs rather than precise selections. If you want to copy a sentence or phrase, you’re often forced to copy a large block of text and then trim it manually in a separate text editor. This is both time-consuming and inefficient.

Basic features like word lookup are also missing in many Mac reading apps, which is a major drawback for learners or researchers who frequently encounter unfamiliar vocabulary.

Navigation is another pain point. These apps typically allow movement only by paragraph or word—offering no support for navigating by sentence or line. Jumping to a specific chapter or subsection is frustratingly unreliable, making the overall reading experience disjointed and clumsy.

To put it bluntly, the user experience is poor. For those of us who rely on screen readers or other assistive tools, it's even worse. Apple's native Books app is barely usable with VoiceOver. Other third-party apps are no better. Speech Central, for example, is a pale imitation compared to robust Windows alternatives like QRead or Bookworm. Voice Dream Reader on macOS doesn't fill the gap either, and while EasyReader has some potential, its interface is slow and unintuitive. Preview adds no real value in this context.

Personally, I’ve resorted to exporting books into RTF format so I can use formatting (italic, bold, underline) to mark key content. But this workaround is impractical for regular use. It also risks altering the original file, which defeats the purpose of preserving a clean copy of the book. Ideally, bookmarking and highlighting should happen inside the app, not through external editing.

For developers and accessibility advocates, this is an open call: we need a powerful, accessible, feature-rich book reading app for macOS. It’s long overdue.