justRead treats a PDF as a book instead of a document. Your PDFs open in the same library as your EPUBs, carrying the same highlights, notes, bookmarks and reading position.
And the highlights you make in a PDF go out to Readwise, to Markdown and to PDF, straight from the device itself.
justRead reads PDFs. It does not edit them. There is no Apple Pencil or freehand ink markup, no drawing, no form filling, no signing and no reordering, merging or deleting of pages. It does not run OCR on a scanned file, and it does not reflow a PDF into a single adjustable column the way PDF Expert's Reading Mode does, because a PDF page is a fixed layout and justRead renders it exactly as printed.
If you need any of that, a PDF editor is the right tool, and we would rather say so here than waste your afternoon. PDF Expert, Documents by Readdle and Adobe Acrobat all handle the document work properly.
What justRead is built for is the other job: reading a four-hundred-page PDF from the first page to the last, keeping your place, keeping your quotes and keeping the file alongside the rest of your books instead of in a separate app.
A PDF lands in the same library as your EPUBs, your comics and your audiobooks. It carries a PDF badge on its cover, and the format filter shows you nothing but the PDFs when that is what you want, or hides them away when it is not.
PDFs get real metadata too. Edit the title, the authors, the series, the series index and the tags, so a coverless scan stops being an unidentifiable grey tile and starts sorting alongside everything else you own.
Highlighting a PDF works exactly as it does in an EPUB. Select the text with your finger, pick one of six colours (one of them a red underline) and write a note on any highlight. Every one of them lands in that book's own highlight list with its colour, its position and its date.
Then it gets out again. Export a book's highlights as a PDF or as Markdown, or send them straight to Readwise from the handset. No desktop step, no web app and no emailing a file off to an import address.
This is the part Apple Books cannot match. Readwise's own documentation states that Apple Books does not create spec-compliant highlights on a PDF, which means no tool anywhere can import them. A quote you mark there stays there.
Open a PDF from the Files app or any share sheet, drag one out of Files and drop it onto the app on iPad, or download it from an OPDS catalogue straight into your library. Password-protected PDFs open as soon as you type the password.
For a proper collection there is Calibre. justRead syncs with the Calibre Content Server over Wi-Fi and PDFs come across alongside your EPUBs, which is the practical way to shift hundreds of files onto an iPhone or iPad without a cable.
Read in pages or in continuous scroll, vertically or horizontally, whichever suits the document best. Set the page fit, switch on a two-page spread with an offset first page and adjust the spacing between pages.
The 20-20-20 eye-break timer runs in the PDF reader, not just in the ebook reader, and the brightness slider sits at the edge of the page where your thumb already rests. Colour inversion works on any PDF, so a scan with a white background baked into it still reads properly at night.
Named one by one, so there is nothing here you go hunting for and fail to find.
Open it from Files or a share sheet, drop it onto the app on iPad, pull it out of an OPDS catalogue or sync a whole shelf of them across from Calibre over Wi-Fi.
Choose pages or scroll, set the page fit and invert the colours if the pages are white. Your position saves itself and catches up on whichever device you pick up next.
Highlight, add notes, then send the whole book's highlights off to Readwise or export them as Markdown or as a PDF.
Three things that readers with large PDF collections keep asking for, and the point at which the usual answers stop short.
Apple Books collections do not scale, its search reaches for the Store before it reaches your own shelf, and PDFs without covers turn the grid into row upon row of identical grey tiles.
Here a PDF has an editable title, author, series and tags, a format badge, filters, collections and eleven sort modes, and the search looks at what you actually own.
Highlights made on a PDF in Apple Books are not spec-compliant annotations, so nothing at all can import them. They stay stuck in the app where you made them.
Highlights here export out to Readwise, to Markdown and to PDF, from the phone itself, by exactly the same route your EPUB highlights take.
Most PDF apps are document tools. They fill in forms and merge pages well, whilst knowing nothing at all about the EPUB half of your library.
PDFs, EPUBs, comics and audiobooks share one library, feed the same reading statistics and count towards the same streak and the same yearly goal.
Including the rows where we lose.
| Reading a PDF of book length | justRead.app | Apple Books | PDF editors |
|---|---|---|---|
| A real library, or just a list of files | Covers, badges, tags, series, collections, filters and eleven ways to sort | A shelf that struggles once a few hundred coverless files land on it | A file browser and some folders |
| Remembers where you left off | Yes, across a cold launch, and it catches up with your other device | Yes, inside Apple's own sync | Varies from app to app, and often only the last file you opened |
| Highlight colours in a PDF | Six, one of which is a red underline, each with a note | Markup pens instead of real text highlights | Usually plenty, plus ink, shapes and stamps |
| Getting those highlights back out | Readwise, Markdown and PDF, straight from the device | No, because its PDF highlights are not spec-compliant annotations | Usually an annotated or a flattened PDF |
| Dark mode on a PDF with a white background | Colour inversion on every PDF | The page simply stays white | Some of them offer a night filter |
| Your ebooks in that same app | Yes. EPUB, PDF, comics and audiobooks, all in one library | EPUB and PDF, on a single crowded shelf | No, PDF documents and nothing else |
| Apple Pencil and freehand ink markup | No | Yes | Yes, this is precisely what they are built for |
| Reflow into a single adjustable column | No | No | Yes. PDF Expert, Documents and Foxit all manage it |
See what readers are saying on the App Store
★ 4.6 / 5 · 24 App Store ratings
Fantastic eReader
Best app I've found for syncing with Calibre. Customisation rivals the great Marvin app, with superior library management.
Great app, responsive dev
The reading experience is already top notch. Really exciting to see where this app develops over time.
Excellent and complete
Beautifully designed and a pleasure to use. The developer had a clear plan from the very first version.
Excellent
Really well designed, and so pleasant to use.
Reading as you want it
A great new iOS epub reader with responsive developers actively adding features. Configure your reading experience just the way you like it.
The best reader on the App Store
Absolute control of customisation. Custom font support. The ability to vote on next features and development.
My new mobile happy place
A beautifully made reader app. Love the statistics and how it works with my 5,000+ book library and cloud storage.
Comprehensive epub reader for iOS
Finally an app that manages a book collection and acts as a fully functional reader. Streams from Dropbox without using phone storage.
Straight answers about PDFs, including the ones that are 'no'.
Yes, and it works exactly as it does in an EPUB. Select the text with your finger, choose one of six colours (one of which is a red underline) and add a note if you want one. This is text selection, not ink: there is no Apple Pencil markup, no pen and no freehand drawing here, which is the main difference between this and a PDF editor. Every highlight goes into that book's own list with its colour, its position and its date, and you can search and share them from there.
Yes. A book's highlights export as a PDF, as Markdown or straight to Readwise, and all three run from the iPhone or iPad with no desktop step in between. It is worth knowing this before you start marking up a long document, because Readwise's own documentation states that Apple Books does not create spec-compliant highlights on a PDF, which means highlights made there cannot be imported anywhere whatsoever.
No, and no reader can without OCR first. A scanned page is a photograph of a page. There is no text layer underneath it, so there is nothing to select, nothing to search and nothing to highlight, and justRead does not run OCR itself. If the file matters, put it through an OCR tool on a computer beforehand, or look for a copy of the book that already carries a text layer.
Not here. A PDF page is a fixed layout at a fixed size, and justRead renders it exactly as printed rather than rebuilding the text into a single column. If reflow is what you need, PDF Expert, Documents by Readdle and Foxit all have a reading mode that does it, and you should use one of those instead. What does help in justRead is continuous scroll, page fit, landscape and a bigger screen. If the same book exists as an EPUB, the EPUB is simply the better copy to read on a phone.
Yes. Your position in a PDF saves itself and survives a cold launch, and when you open the same book on another device it catches up with the furthest page you reached there. Bookmarks, table of contents navigation, a go-to-page sheet and full text search all sit in the PDF reader too.
Yes. Time spent in a PDF feeds the same sessions, the same daily goal, the same streak, the same calendar heatmap and the same yearly recap as an ebook does. A work PDF counts as reading, because reading is exactly what it is.
PDFs sync alongside your EPUBs through the Calibre Content Server over Wi-Fi, with the same New, Changed and Synced states as everything else in the library. For a sizeable PDF collection this is the practical route onto an iPhone or iPad, and it works in both directions.
No. justRead does not fill in forms, sign, redact, merge, split or reorder pages, and it does not edit page content either. Those are document jobs, and a PDF editor does them properly: PDF Expert, Adobe Acrobat and Documents by Readdle are all good at it. justRead is for reading the PDF and keeping hold of what you marked in it.