Foliate

Open an ebook, adjust the page presentation and keep notes alongside your reading. Its library view and lookup tools help when moving between books or checking unfamiliar words.

For academic reading, use Zotero to organise references and citations alongside your ebook reader.

When it is useful

Foliate suits long reading sessions where the page should adapt to your screen rather than look like a scanned sheet. With a reflowable EPUB, font size, spacing and margins can make a substantial difference on a small laptop. Bookmarks and annotations help when returning to a chapter for study. Fixed-layout publications behave differently, so judge the experience with the kind of books you actually read.

A practical way to get started

Open one book, adjust the typography and compare paginated and scrolling views. Try the contents list and search with a passage you can easily recognise, then add a test annotation and reopen the book to check your workflow. If your notes matter, include Foliate’s annotation data as well as the book files in your backup plan; preserving the ebook alone is not the same as preserving your reading notes.

What to consider before choosing

Treat Foliate primarily as a reader. If the task is correcting metadata, converting formats or organising a large mixed collection, a library-management application may fit better. Dictionary, translation and other online lookups can send the selected text to an external service, so decide whether to use them for private documents. Test the actual file you plan to read rather than assuming every edition will render identically.