[graycyn]

For a long while, if reading on Android, I'd use Bookari (Mantano). But they've stopped maintaining it, and after doing an Android update on my phone, it's got a serious issue, i.e. book opens, but pages can't be turned.

So, I switched to Pocketbook reader, and like it fine, it's always been one of my reliable testing readers but recently heard about Colibrio.

So I tested a brand new epub 3 in it, it performed great, honored my CSS with one exception, abbreviations that were marked up with the abbr tag showed a dotted underline, though I didn't style it that way. But it's default behavior, so no biggie. It allowed me to adjust LOTS of reading parameters, without going overboard. I even liked their dark mode and I'm not a huge dark mode fan. Then I hit the read aloud function. SWEET!

Read aloud offered different languages (I only tested US and UK English) and also some 10 different voices. Reading speed was adjustable, but finer increments would have been nice. However, it does offer read-along highlighting.

The impressive part, which I've NOT seen on other reader apps, was that this app read the alt text for images! The developers seem to be interested in inclusive publishing, which undoubtedly explains why they ignored my CSS for the abbreviations.

Another interesting bit was that in this particular epub, hyphenation is turned off for headings. So I cranked the font size to 400% on my phone to see what would happen. Many readers will just run a long word that can't hyphenate right off the screen. Others will break the word up in odd places. NOT this one! It intelligently shrunk the font size for that particular word or phrase just enough to fit the screen width! That's the first I've seen that behavior! Not bad!

Another point of interest, in my book, I'd been playing with a CSS property (hanging-punctuation) that is *not* well-supported in e-readers yet, but one I'm sure many would *like* to see supported. OK, I don't know if this app supports it or not, but if it doesn't, then it DOES support the feature query I put in with a *supports not* fallback! Lots of readers DON'T support a feature query.

So, with a good epub3, one that has valid CSS and passes EPUBCheck, this app did beautifully! Can't say if it would handle spotty problem ePubs or not ... I try not to make those. 🤣

So many Android reader apps are horrid, was nice to come across this one. Supposedly it is also available on iOS, will have to try it on my iPad. Think it may become my go-to reader for phone or tablet.

Figured others might want to give it a try. Free, no ads. Came out in August 2021, last updated in November. Hard to say if it will stick around, but I hope it does!


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