However, it’s probably overkill if you’re the kind of reader who keeps books in a pile and steadily works through them one at a time.

If your digital library is huge and varied, Polar is a great way to catalogue and organise it. It’s more suitable for organising large quantities of non-fiction resources than libraries of novels.

We found Polar a little temperamental when opening some file formats, particularly free books in the EPUB format that we downloaded from Project Gutenberg. Both features are easy to access from the window on the left. The other is very similar but uses tags, so you can group publications by type, author or any other attribute you can think of. The first is a folder-like system that’s perfect for grouping projects together, for example. One of the best things about Polar is the tree-like structure it uses for grouping files and projects together. Every book you open appears in a new window, which is helpful if you’re working on a research project and want to cross-reference multiple titles.

It’s designed to help university-level students manage text books, which is probably why it has such a functional look and feel, but if you can live with lists of books rather than attractive libraries of thumbnail covers, you’ll find it has a lot of useful extra tools.

Polar is an open-source book-management tool. We think you’ll need to reconfigure its default settings to read books comfortably on your PC, but it’s worth the effort. To browse through the book, you have to press the Page Up and Page Down buttons on the keyboard, while to access the menu – where you can tweak the program’s unfortunate default settings – you press the Escape key.Ĭalibre isn’t the easiest software to use for reading a book on your PC or laptop, but it’s very good at storing and managing your library, no matter where your books come from. When you double-click a book, it opens in a new window that’s about the size and shape of an ebook reader screen, but without the intuitive touch interface.

Free ebook reader for pc