Freading

• Free

Last verified 7 Aug 2026

4.6 2838 ratings · App Store

1. 5/5Downloads stopped working

   I have used Freading for several years and especially liked it while libraries were closed. However, the recent changes make it harder to use, and today my downloads stopped working. The login changes mean that I have to log in for every download. In the past, I could download my entire week at once. Now the app kicks me out and I have to log in each time. I can’t find any help for the download glitch. So, even though I have one book left in my weekly supply I can’t access it.

   clunns · 7 Aug 2026

2. 1/5An update (and still one star)

   As a former applications programmer I’d like to know if anyone even bothered to test this before releasing it! Trying to use the Settings to get the page to be readable is almost impossible to use. I have the font size up to its maximum and the size is still incredibly small. Many times when I try to make a change (e.g. the line height), the screen goes blank except for the settings themselves—which are then unusable—and in order to get out of it I need to close the app and reopen it. If any developer is reading this I want them to know that I’m on a 5th generation iPad using the latest iPad OS 14. Please fix this as soon as possible because I can’t possibly read anything on your app until something is done. And by the way, please implement double columns in landscape mode. Thanks. UPDATE: This observation may lead the developers to a fix. I couldn’t get Catherine Aird’s “The Calleshire Chronicles, Volume 3” in any of my other online libraries, so I was forced to use Freading. When I try to increase the font size, only the chapter name and number increase while the main text remains the same. I hope this leads to a solution. Please, please fix this!

   -- Old School -- · 7 Aug 2026

3. 3/5Good reader, flawed catalog

   I truly enjoy using Freading to read ebooks, but there are two glaring problems with the catalog part of the app. These were cited over a year ago by another reviewer, but the developer hasn’t addressed them. First, either allow the book cover icons to be sized up or add the titles and authors to a text line under or above the icon. Even on my iPad Pro, some of the titles on the covers are completely unreadable. This is a simple fix and shouldn’t take much to implement. The second is that the app loses track of where you are in the list of books when you come back from looking at the book details. This is especially annoying when you’ve gone pages and pages down and now have to page back down again to find your spot. This is so time consuming that I generally have my browser up on GoodReads and look up the title there. This is not the way apps are supposed to work; the user experience is terrible. My library also has Libby which has its own quirks, but suffers from none of these flaws and is much, much more useable.

   Halyard1964 · 7 Aug 2026

4. 1/5Only works if you have the magic touch

   This app is the most frustrating reading app I’ve ever used. It takes a magic touch to actually access the book you’ve borrowed. I click the book in my downloads. It just goes to my library’s listing of the book and shows that it’s been downloaded. I go back and click redownload, as that’s the only other clickable thing to do. Opens a blurry screen with what looks like a might become a progress bar, but never does. It’s impossible to actually open the book that you’ve been told you have downloaded. And even at the start, the library app doesn’t take you to the Freading app. It just downloads the book and stops there. You have to know to then open the Freading app, although that doesn’t do a lick of good. Magically, I’ve been able to read some books through this app, but I could not begin to tell you how.

   TulsaTwinmom · 7 Aug 2026

5. 5/5Dark Theme Fail

   I love Freading and have been using it for several years. I opened a book last night with theme set to automatic. It was just a black screen. I knew that I had already started reading this book and that it had downloaded successfully, so where were the words? I tried to edit the dark theme to have the background dark and the font white, but nothing changed. I ended up choosing light theme so I could read. Please look into this and see about getting it fixed.

   57scooper · 7 Aug 2026

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