Ebooks are a great way to enjoy literature – they’re cheaper than print books due to the lack of print and distribution costs (and completely free if the work is in the public domain), and you start reading seconds after buying one.

The text to speech method on a Macintosh computer allows users to select any amount of text and convert it into speech, which enables your Mac to read out loud to you. This can be a useful procedure for those needing to rest their eyes from the computer screen or for those who want to multitask.

You don’t need a specialist device like a Kindle either thanks to the many free ebook readers available for your desktop. These are particularly good for students who want to reference texts in their work, add annotations, or refer to online resources.

So what makes a good ebook reader? For general use, a clear layout and the ability to sync your bookshelf across multiple devices are essential; for students, note-taking and bookmarks are essential; and for anyone who sometimes struggles with their eyesight, text-to-speech and one-click font customization are welcome additions.

Text Reader is an app that can turn text to speech. This application was last updated in 2003; that was 8 years ago, ages in computer time. Since then, Mac OS X has introduced its own text-to-speech system, so some of the features of this app might feel redundant. Text Reader 1.2.1 - Saves text file to audio file using text-to-speech. Download the latest versions of the best Mac apps at safe and trusted MacUpdate Download, install, or update Text Reader for Mac from MacUpdate.

• Thinking of buying a Kindle? Find the right one for you

1. Kindle for PC

The best free ebook reader, whether you use Amazon or not

Amazon’s official Kindle app for Windows (as well as Mac and mobile devices) is smart and stylish, and although it tempts you with reading suggestions from the Kindle store, the sales pitch isn’t too in-your-face.

There’s no setup necessary if you already have an Amazon account. Just log in with your usual username and password and your virtual shelves will be populated automatically (though you’ll have to click a book’s cover to download it, so bear this in mind if you’re planning some offline reading). Notes and bookmarks are synced across devices automatically, as are flashcards – an extremely useful addition for students using digital textbooks for revision.

Kindle for Windows also includes text-to-speech function, and changing font sizes and color schemes is as simple as clicking or tapping a button.

2. Freda

Premium features for free – Freda is a real rival to Amazon’s crown

Freda (from the delightfully-named Turnipsoft) is a superb ebook reader that integrates with Project Gutenberg, giving you access to thousands of free ebooks, and Smashwords, where you can find works from independent authors and publishers. Importing your own ebooks is a piece of cake too, with support for all the most popular formats. You can even connect Freda to your Dropbox account enabling you to access books from multiple devices.

Freda supports bookmarks, annotations and highlighting, making it a good choice for students. There’s also text-to-speech for anyone who has trouble with text on screens, as well as auto-scroll and speed-read – a tool that works much like Spritz, displaying words in quick succession so you can read without moving your eyes.

Freda is funded by ads, but these are discreet and are only visible on the bookshelf screen; they won’t interrupt your reading.

3. Calibre

An open source ebook reader that’s a great choice for students

Calibre is an open source ebook reader and manager that’s lightweight and lightning-fast. Unlike many free ebook readers, Calibre supports Amazon’s AWZ format (though it won’t open DRM-protected files) as well as all the other popular ebook file types, and if any metadata is missing (such as genre or cover art), you can add it yourself using the bookshelf’s options menu.

One of Calibre’s best features is Reference Mode, which displays the current chapter and paragraph number in the top left – ideal if you need to cite references in an essay. We also like Flow Mode, where text is shown as a continuous scrolling stream without page breaks; not as pleasant as simulated page-turning for recreational reading, but a handy time-saver to avoid flicking backwards and forwards through a textbook.

4. Sumatra PDF

A PDF, ebook and comic reader that's ideal for multiple PCs

Despite its name, Sumatra PDF is a great little ebook reader, capable of displaying books in EPUB and MOBI format, as well as comic books in CBZ and CBR comic books.

Sumatra PDF is a portable app, so you can save it to a USB stick or cloud storage service and use it on any PC. You can save your ebooks in the same place too, eliminating the need to sync your library.

It’s easy to adjust basic settings like font size, but Sumatra PDF’s advanced options can only be edited by opening a text file and typing in new values. If you want to change the page color, for example, you’ll need to find the hex code for your preferred shade and enter it on the appropriate line. It’s not difficult, but we’d prefer a graphical interface.

There’s no way to add notes or highlights, but the convenience of carrying your ebook library and reader anywhere might outweigh those drawbacks for you.

5. Icecream Ebook Reader

A stylish free ebook reader, but lacking advanced features

Icecream specializes in smart, no-frills software, and Icecream Ebook Reader is no exception. It supports EPUB, MOBI, PDF and FB2 ebook formats, and once you’ve imported your books they’re arranged in a neat bookshelf with a choice of viewing options. One particularly handy feature is the ability to archive and export your ebooks; ideal if you use more than one PC and don’t want the hassle of importing your books twice. There’s no cloud syncing though.

The reader itself is similar to the Kindle app in appearance, with one-click (or tap) buttons for changing font size, color theme (day, night, or sepia), and viewing the table of contents.

Unfortunately, some of the options you can see in the menus are only available if you hand over US$19.95 (about £15, AU$25) for the Pro version. Premium features include importing multiple ebooks simultaneously, adding notes, editing metadata, and copying text.

The free version of Icecream Ebook Reader is quick and very easy to use, but only really suitable for recreational reading. Students will find the lack of note-taking and copying frustrating.

• Want to write your own ebook? Check out the best free software for writers

Reeder is the best RSS reader for Mac users. It syncs with a slew of third-party services, looks good, and makes it easy to share content with others.

RSS? Didn’t Google kill that off a long, long time ago?

The closure of Google Reader had many predicting the death of RSS, but in its wake, numerous services have sprung up, and there’s been a resurgence in RSS applications for both iOS and macOS.

Unread — our favorite app for reading RSS feeds on the iPad — doesn’t have a desktop version, but that doesn’t mean the genre is dead. Quite the opposite in fact; searching “RSS” in the Mac App Store yields well over a dozen applications for sale.

Plus, anecdotally speaking, there seems to be an increasing number of individuals moving to RSS from social networks like Twitter or Facebook to better filter out junk news.

So, which one is best?

Evaluation Criteria for the Best RSS Reader

When looking at RSS clients for the Mac, integration is the name of the game. Any real contender should be able to pull feeds from any of the popular online services such as Feedly, Feed Wrangler, Feedbin, NewsBlur and more.

In testing RSS apps for this review, I set up accounts with Feedly, Feedbin, and Feed Wrangler with the same set of feeds subscribed to in each. For apps that don’t sync with RSS services, I had a test .OPML file with the same feeds in the same folders.

Getting data out is just as important, however. A good RSS app should be able to save content to read-it-later services and share links on social networks as well as built-in macOS apps like Mail, Messages, and more.

Lastly, and perhaps most important, a good RSS client should be easy to use and present users with a clean, efficient reading environment. When it comes to dealing with lots of text, good UI and UX decisions are critical.

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Our Pick: Reeder is the Best RSS Reader for Mac

The best RSS reader for Mac is Reeder 4.

Reeder should be a familiar name to iOS users. In fact, when the Mac app first launched in 2011, it was a port from iOS to the Mac. Here’s Federico Viticci in his review of the original app:

Whilst Reeder for iOS and Reeder for Mac are the same app as far as the main concept goes (quickly fetch unread items for Google Reader, skim through them easily, provide features to do anything you want with RSS feeds), Reeder on macOS is obviously more “powerful” when you take in consideration the keyboard support, the subscription management, or the simple fact that links can be opened in the background in your desktop browser. For as much as people have criticized Reeder for Mac for being the start of an evil trend that will see iOS apps coming to the desktop (good luck with that), the undeniable truth is that Reeder is a Mac app, with all the evident advantages and limitations that come with it.

While the app we have today has seen a lot of improvements and changes in the years since launch, the fundamental experience of using Reeder has remained: it’s a fast and fluid way to blast through RSS feeds on the Mac.

Reeder and Online Services

Reeder can sync with a whole suite of online services, including:

Reeder syncs smoothly with all three of my test accounts: Feedly, Feedbin, and Feed Wrangler. Unlike some apps that struggle with Feed Wrangler’s filters-that-are-only-kind-of-folders approach, Reeder knew what to do, presenting items organized by folder like the other accounts.

When coupled with one of these services, Reeder will pull in unread items based on their state with the service. Mark something read on the web, and Reeder won’t pull it as unread.

This means that if you use an RSS client on your iPad or iPhone as well as your Mac, they should stay in sync. Marking something as read on one device will mean it will show as read on others.

Syncing with a web service also means that the speed at which an article will appear in Reeder isn’t up to the app itself, but the service in question.

Speaking of speed, Reeder can be incredibly fast. In testing, it was able to sync with a Feedly account with 4,500 unread items in less than a minute.

Service sharing in Reeder 4 has changed significantly. Whereas in Reeder, a whole host of sharing services could be used, Reeder 4 has opted to trim away direct support for all these services and instead uses the system share sheet.

The Actions and Sharing section of Reeder 4’s preferences essentially takes the system share sheet and adds the option to add these services directly to Reeder’s reading toolbar:

Once set up, this can be prove to be very powerful and efficient, but the setup process is a little clunky. A sharing method has to be enabled, but the app also allows a user to pin these to the toolbar or be assigned a keyboard shortcut.

All in all, Reeder 4 has opted to scale back the amount of direct support for third-party services in the latest update, but we don’t feel there’s a huge loss in functionality. Most of these sharing services were duplicated between the direct support in Reeder 3 and the share sheet in macOS. Trimming back direct support makes Reeder 4 feel more consistent and focused.

Read it Later in Reeder

Reeder has long had the ability to sync your read-it-later queue from Instapaper and read your queue right within the app. Once you’ve plowed through your RSS feeds and saved what you want to read, having the ability to stay within the app to read your Instapaper queue keeps everything consistent and easy to use.

Reeder 4 takes read-it-later one step further: you can now create a Reeder 4 “Read Later” account, which syncs across both Mac and iOS. Read Later acts much like the Instapaper integration — you can add items quickly and easily to Read Later and, well, read those articles at a later time.

Read Later is a proprietary read-it-later service built into Reeder 4, so you can’t send articles from Safari to your Reeder Read Later account.

One of my favorite parts about Reeder’s Read Later service is how it handles articles in your article list. Whenever you click on an article in the regular feed article list, the article is marked as “read,” the Read Later article list does not automatically mark an article as “read” if you click on it. You have to make the conscious decision to mark your Read Later articles as “read,” ensuring they don’t disappear from your Read Later list accidentally.

It’s great to see Reeder 4 build out its read-it-later functionality with its own internal service, and it sure would be great if the internal service was accessible from other apps across macOS. As it stands, the Read Later function is likely best suited for those who are looking to keep their RSS articles separate from their larger read-it-later queue inside Instapaper.

Reading in Reeder

RSS is all about text, so if the best RSS reader is going to be worth its salt, then it should provide a great reading experience.

Free Text Apps For Computer

Reeder tackles this with a whole slew of settings:

I normally wouldn’t be sharing so many screenshots of preferences, but I think it’s important to note just how many tools are at the user’s fingertips when it comes to fine-tuning Reeder.

Appearance handles everything from a theming perspective. You can select a color theme — I like “Dark Reeder” quite a lot — and tweak the list font size, and a few other small details.

You can also set Reeder’s layout between single, compact, regular, and full. These layout options will keep Reeder in your selected layout choice no matter how you navigate through the app.

The default layout is a “Full” layout: a three-pane window with source, article list, and content:

The “Single” layout keeps every list (source, article list, and content) in a single screen:

The “Compact” layout keeps your source list and article list in the same window, and opens your content in a view of its own:

The “Regular” layout keeps your article list and content together, and a simple swipe of the mouse or trackpad to the right will pull your source list open:

Finally, if you want to cycle through all of these layouts on a whim, you can choose the “Automatic” layout, which moves between the layouts as you drag the app larger and smaller.

While all of these settings can be overwhelming together, they grant the ability to fine-tune the Reeder experience.

Reading is a hodgepodge of more font settings, allowing you to customize font size, spacing, and the alignment of titles and body content.

New in Reeder 4 is a Bionic Reading feature, designed to help reading comprehension by bolding specific segments of individual words. Per the sales pitch:

A higher dimension of reading. With Bionic Reading you read texts with more focus, awareness, and sustainability.

You can customize how Bionic Reading is configured right within the preferences window.

Navigating Reeder can be lightning fast. In addition to customizable and nearly endless keyboard shortcuts, the application supports numerous gestures for trackpad users:

Once these gestures and keyboard shortcuts are ingrained, they make skimming and reading articles lightning-fast. In fact, the gestures in particular remind me that Reeder started out on iOS.

While that may sound like a problem from an old-school Mac fan, the reality is that the best apps on the Mac should be flexible and powerful while easy to use. Things like gestures are a big part of that, but Reeder isn’t beholden to them.

In short, Reeder is powerful and easy to use, and it’s my favorite way to read RSS items while at my desk.

Reeder is $9.99 and can be purchased in the Mac App Store.

Runner Up: ReadKit for Mac

While Reeder has been around since 2011, it took the developer some time to re-group after Google shuttered Reader. In the meantime, Readkit ($4.99) was used by many — myself included — to read RSS feeds on the Mac.

On the surface, ReadKit looks a lot like Reeder. However, it lacks a lot of the polish found in our favorite app.

Right off the bat — as I was signing into my test Feedly account on the web — ReadKit interrupted, asking to be set as the default RSS application on my MacBook Pro.

Once my account was set up, it was noticeably slower to fetch my test library of 4,500 unread items and took considerably more CPU to do so.

In fact, despite anything I did, ReadKit remained listed in the “Apps Using Significant Energy” menu item on my MacBook Pro running macOS Yosemite almost all of the time. I leave my RSS app open all day; I want it to have as little impact on my notebook’s battery life as possible.

Like Reeder, ReadKit offers access to all sorts of RSS services, but the list is shorter:

• Feedly
• NewsBlur
• Fever
• Feed Wrangler
• Feedbin

ReadKit offers users the choice of four themes, including one named “Corporation” that will look familiar if you’ve read the first 1,000 words of this article:

ReadKit employs smart folders to quickly see what’s happening in your various accounts. Read Later, RSS News (new unread items), and RSS Starred are the three default folders, but creating new ones to act as filters on incoming content is pretty straight-forward for anyone who has set up rules in Mail or smart folders in Finder:

While Smart Folders can be a great way to speed up reading, ReadKit itself isn’t as fluid as Reeder. There’s no gesture support to speak of, and it can be hard to tell where the focus is — more often that not, tapping the down key on my keyboard would scroll down the article itself, not the list of unread items as I had intended.

ReadKit and Read-it-Later Services

While Reeder can only send items to services like Pocket or Instapaper, ReadKit doubles as a client for these services as well, putting your Instapaper, Pocket, or even Pinboard articles in the same application as incoming RSS content.

This makes ReadKit a bit of a trojan horse — the Greek kind, not the scary computer virus kind. It looks like an RSS client, but in reality, can serve as a local Instapaper or Pinboard client just as easily. In testing, I had Feedly, Feedbin, Feed Wrangler, Instapaper, and Pocket all hooked up.

ReadKit ships with a “Focus Mode” that strips away all of the source column cruft and puts reading front and center:

This helps ReadKit feel more like a read-it-later service, but I honestly don’t care for it. Reading RSS items and articles I’ve saved for later are very different, and I don’t care for having them in the same environment. Coupled with the confusion of ReadKit’s interface — seriously, put tooltips on buttons — ReadKit feels crowded and stressful.

As a further annoyance, signing into one of these services as a source for things to read doesn’t let the app send items to it without entering your account credentials again.

If you’re looking for a jack-of-all-trades, ReadKit’s a good option, but Reeder is a nicer option.

Other RSS Reading apps

Leaf

Leaf is a $9.99 app that is highly rated in the Mac App Store.

It syncs with Feedbin, Feedly, NewsBlur, and Feed Wrangler, or it can just run locally. It synced quickly with all web services, but right off the bat started advertising to me:

Leaf’s design relies heavily on thumbnails from articles placed in circles. While, thankfully, a toggle can be set to turn them into squares, the reality is that a lot of articles don’t include images.

To accommodate for this, the app will put the site’s icon in the item list, or an image from the source, if the article is a linked list-style post.

For example, above is the RSS feed for my site. That photo of the smartwatch isn’t from 512 Pixels; its from Pebble’s blog post I linked to. In short, Leaf makes it appear that Pebble’s image belongs to 512 Pixels.

To be fair, Leaf isn’t alone in this behavior — Feedly does it on their website — but I find it a bit troubling as a website publisher. That image isn’t mine; I don’t want it to look like I’m using it without permission.

While on the design front, Leaf offers several font and color theme options. The flat design coupled with a little transparency here and there may be trendy, but the app feels a little cluttered.

Leaf comes with a good selection of sharing options, support for push notifications, and runs smoothly on my MacBook Pro. However, its limited support for RSS services and odd design choices should be considered when choosing an app.

Further, the last time Leaf was updated was over a year ago in early 2018. We’ll keep our eye on Leaf to see if it’s still supported.

Vienna

I have fond memories of running Vienna for several years on my old PowerBook G4.

Vienna stands out in the crowd, as it’s free and open source, meaning anyone can help build it.

Vienna can sync with BazQux, FeedHQ, InoReader, The Old Reader or any other Open Reader server of your choice.

Vienna feels dated to most of the other apps tested, but everything renders well enough, and its built-in filtering is pretty handy:

Sadly, under testing on macOS Yosemite, Vienna was prone to freezing and even crashing. However, it was the fastest at syncing my test library of feeds. If you’re looking for something open source and free, Vienna is about your only choice, but I’m not keeping it on my Dock.

RSS Reader

The simply-named RSS Reader is a $1.99 app that lives in the Mac’s menubar.

The application doesn’t support OPML import (or export), but searches for feeds once a web address is entered. That lack of file import sets the bar for RSS Reader: it’s simple. Really simple:

The menu bar icon turns blue when new items come in. Once they do, items are sorted by publish date in the main window. Clicking an item will open a preview of it in an adjoining window. While some may appreciate the simplicity, it’s limiting at best, in my opinion. If you have a lot of feeds, this lack of structure will break down quickly.

NewsBar RSS Reader

Much like RSS Reader, NewsBar isn’t a traditional windowed application — instead, it floats, pinned to the edge of the screen:

I think of NewsBar more like a ticker than an RSS reader. You can set keywords to be highlighted (notice the yellow words in that screenshot) and hover your mouse over an item to see an article’s content, which are both clever, but NewsBar doesn’t make sense for someone who wants a stress-free reading experience.

RSS Bot

RSS Bot is a free app that shows advertising at start-up like Leaf, but lives in the menu bar like RSS Reader.

RSS Bot crashed while importing my test .OPML file, and adding feeds one by one was slow, as it took the app nearly a minute to “retrieve and process” each feed.

RSS Bot couldn’t resolve The Sweet Setup’s feed, but once I got a few other feeds added, I couldn’t get RSS Bot to see new unread items.

RSS Reader Plus

RSS Reader Plus is a $4.99 app that looks a lot like Vienna. So much so, I got curious and dug around a little inside the app bundle:

I don’t know what’s going on here, but I do know RSS Reader Plus isn’t worth its price tag. It doesn’t sync with any third-party web services, isn’t optimized for Retina displays, and routinely took massive amounts of CPU power in normal usage.

Feedly

The popular RSS web service Feedly has a free Mac app that’s just a wrapper around their website.

While it’s nice to be able to tab over to your RSS items, if you want to use Feedly on the web, you’re better served by doing so in a browser, which will be faster and less…weird.

NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire was the first popular RSS client for macOS, and while it ruled the kingdom for the better part of a decade, its current status hasn’t kept up with the times

The app only syncs with its own RSS service; there’s no support for Feedly, Feed Wrangler or others. While this syncing has been fine in our testing, I found it to be stable while importing my test OPML file and pulling in several thousand unread items.

For now, NetNewsWire isn’t a solid contender.

Conclusion: The Best RSS Reader is Reeder 4

In short, there is one great RSS app for macOS: Reeder 4.

ReadKit’s not bad, but overreaches, and there’s a lot of junk on the Mac App Store fighting for attention. Take MobileRSS for example — it’s well-rated, but is designed to sync with Google Reader. The app hasn’t gotten an update since 2011.

Reeder 4’s latest update trims back in areas that overlapped with macOS, introduced new animations and a freshly altered design, introduced Bionic Reading mode for improved reading comprehension, and added its own internal Read Later service for keeping your RSS read-it-later articles separate from Instapaper or Pocket. Perhaps most importantly, Reeder 4’s new code-base is very consistent with its iOS brother, ensuring future updates for both platforms should come at a quicker pace.

Text To Speech Software For Mac Free Download

RSS is alive and well, and it’s alive and well on the Mac if you ignore the noise in the Mac App Store and aim for the top.

Text Reader App For The Blind

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Text Reader App For Android

An online course to help you save time, organize your notes, and master the best writing app for Mac and iOS: Ulysses.