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.
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Double check, last time I…
Double check, last time I checked bookwarm is still purely windows only, only open issue about looking for a contributor to port it to the mac.
You may be on to something...
A Google search brought me to the above page, when searching for BookWorm Epub reader for Mac.
Sad, as it is available for certain versions of Linux, but not Mac?
https://babluboy.github.io/bookworm/
If so then apologies for posting the link in my previous post. 😔
Apple Books
Apple Books should really get this right. They finally made it usable with Ventura, but there are still issues. This is another good point to bring up when the next AppleVis report card rolls around, assuming those reports are taken seriously by Apple.
I mean it's a broader issue…
I mean it's a broader issue with selecting text with voiceover native commands in chromium browsers and preview pdf renderer, as well as apple books..
Re: Open Call for Accessible, Real Book Reading App on Mac
Have you tried "Thorium"? Looks like this one actually covers PC and Mac. Link below. 🙂
https://www.edrlab.org/software/thorium-reader/
Apple Books
In Books you can not navigate through lines and sentences. Don’t know it might be me who’s doing it wrong, but I can not even select content to copy.
If you can’t select with the…
If you can’t select with the native commands, try using the voiceovercommands for selection, interact with the paragraph then press VO enter.
Some parts of the request are incorrect
For example, you refer that no tool has bookmark tool to select the text in paragraph.
By definition in dictionary, bookmark is "A marker, often made of paper, fabric, or other material, placed between the pages of a book to keep the reader’s place.".
As such bookmark shouldn't have such functionality actually if any app applies that, that is an indication of semantically wrong design.
This generally belongs to the highlight tool, and most apps actually have this including Speech Central and Voice Dream.
Further, I am not aware that Speech Central doesn't support any of the mentioned use cases. Something can be made more efficient (and something is already supported at the maximal efficiency), but nothing is so inefficient that you would need to go to another app to edit the text as a better solution.
The only thing that stays is something that I have confirmed many times is that if you opt to read with VoiceOver as the main approach and not with the app's audio, then you will meet with quite a lot of friction. As said, this is exactly what happens in visual reading so it is reasonable that VoiceOver reflects that. I also agree that technically it can be like what you request.
But then we come down to the essential problem - if the app was funded only by blind users and made specifically for them, it would fit in some aspects better, but over the time it would experience the lack of funding which would lead to the lack of development. And it is very hard to keep up against competitors if they have 30x more of funding.
Either way that part of request is possible and correct and you have every right to try to achieve what you desire, I have only pointed to some limitations that you should expect, not that you should give up on trying to achieve that.
Speech Central
Speech Central is a great app. the thing that hold me back from using it aren't really Speech central problems. I have partial hearing loss, so I need good voices. Speech central has access has access to all of the voices, except the Siri ones, provided by Apple, plus with a few workarounds you can acquire the Microsoft natural Voices, or Microsoft voices anyway. I came to realize, after an overly long an embarrasing time, that since I lack a payment method, any key I might acquire from Microsoft services, or any AI service, simply won't work. So I'm limited to the Apple Vocalizer voices, which are fine for my daily use but not so good for lying in bed reading a book.
RE: Speech Central
This deviates a bit from the topic, so I'll try to be brief.
Regarding Siri it is almost certain that one day EU or some government will force Apple to allow apps to use them, but there are bigger problems to expect it to happen immediately.
As such you are currently limited to possible other solutions:
- Speech Central supports open-source tts servers, so if you setup such a server on your Mac you can use it for free. I find that to be non-trivial, but then I am surprised on how many people did it including some blind people.
- There are also CereProc voices that work on the Mac, they are not free but they cost like $20 per voice and you can use them in Speech Central (or any other app including in VoiceOver). Unfortunately other companies gave up on this. They also have iOS product, but it had fairly high latency so it didn't work well with some use cases (like VoiceOver or Speech Central).
The New Reading app
I here the new Mac OS version does introduces some reading app as part of magnifier or something. If it can show Epub and PDF files in an easy to navigate User interface, then I guess problem solved.
Anyone on beta version seen something like this yet?