A Reader for Every Book You Actually Own

There's a moment every ebook owner eventually hits: you have the book — paid for it, can see it on your shelf in someone's app — and you cannot open it anywhere else. Searching for "an EPUB reader for all my books" usually starts right there. So before recommending any reader, including ours, it's worth being precise about which books are actually yours to move.

The two kinds of ebooks you own

DRM-free files — EPUBs and PDFs with no encryption — are genuinely yours. Any reader can open them, forever, on anything. This covers most technical publishers, indie storefronts, public-domain libraries, humble bundles, review copies, manuscripts, and every PDF report you've ever downloaded.

DRM-locked purchases — Kindle and Apple Books titles above all — are encrypted to the store that sold them.

We'd rather say that plainly than imply otherwise: any app claiming to open your Kindle library either isn't telling you the whole story or is asking you to break the lock yourself. The practical answer is to buy DRM-free where you can — and there's far more of it than most readers realise. Our guide to where to find DRM-free ebooks maps the legitimate sources, from technical publishers to indie stores to the public domain.

What a DRM-free-first reader looks like

If your library is files rather than store accounts, the reader's job changes. It has to be good at ingestion — files arrive from everywhere — and it has to treat the files as possessions, not streams. Velo is built that way:

• Import from anywhere. EPUB, PDF, TXT, Markdown — one tap through the iOS Share Sheet from Files, Safari, or Mail. Web articles land cleaned of ads and ready to read.
• On-device, offline. Books parse entirely on your device — nothing is uploaded — and the library reads fully offline. Sync across iPhone, iPad, and Mac is an opt-in Pro feature, not the app's operating assumption.
• Real rendering. Typeset pages with the book's actual structure. PDFs are rebuilt on import — chapters detected, running headers and page numbers stripped, footnotes linked, two-column layouts resequenced — so a downloaded report reads like a book instead of a printout.

And a reason to bring the books here

Beyond rendering the file, Velo adds something no other EPUB reader has: two reading modes over one synced position. Reader is the traditional page. RSVP streams the text one word at a time at a fixed focus point — 50 to 1,000 WPM — which is the strongest attention lock available for on-screen reading, and honestly better as a focus tool than a speed tool (here's the evidence). Switch between them mid-sentence; your place survives.

Both modes are free, with import for up to 3 books, reading stats, and a built-in library of public-domain classics — a shelf of genuinely DRM-free books included on day one. The books locked in walled gardens stay there; everything else deserves a better home.

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