About eBooks

Barnes&Noble, eBooks.com, Sony, Google Play Books and many other vendors of books and eReaders are supporting the EPUB format. And there are a lot of publishing houses that support EPUB, too.

Some of the books you can buy online are encrypted, using a mechanism called DRM, which stands for Digital Rights Management and can be applied to EPUB files. Evie cannot open DRM protected files.

There are a lot of publishers that opted for leaving their books not encrypted. There is some debate on whether or not DRM protects the author or if it is more for the publishing house, or the seller or if it even infringes on the buyer’s rights.

Despite being so popular, PDF is actually a poor choice for Text To Speech book readers. PDF is a file format intended for printing with precisely positioned graphics and page structure. It was not intended for distributing text content. As a result, getting the text out of a PDF file to read it out loud is not always possible.

If you have a choice, get your books in the EPUB format, or at least FB2. Even plain text is a better format in this regard.

Evie needs to be be able to recompose the flow of text from PDF to read it out loud.
That is not trivial, as PDF does not contain text arranged in sentences or paragraphs, like a Word document or a text file. It only has graphical symbols, positioned at very precise positions in the page. That works well for viewing the document, or printing it, but it makes text extraction very complicated.

Some documents may have enough information for Evie to use in finding the actual text, but some don’t. The text from some docs will be missing or garbled. For those, you will have to use the OCR option.
Even if the PDF is complete, Evie has to rely on the position of the characters on the PDF page to recompose the flow of text. Sometimes Evie cannot find where a word ends and the next one starts, or it may insert line breaks in the middles of sentences. In such cases too, you may have better results using the OCR option.

To make matters worse, headers and footers are not marked as such in PDF, and they seem to be just part of the text. If you want to suppress repetitive or irrelevant text, you can use the Pronunciation Editor in Evie. It allows you to change the way words are pronounced but also to silence text, even entire sentences.

All these problems make PDF text extraction very complicated, hence we always recommend against PDF as a format for reading books in Evie. If you have the option to choose between PDF and EPUB when buying an electronic book, choose EPUB. Also, FB2, DOCX or even TEXT files are better for voice readers than PDF.

If you want, you can also see the original PDF page layout in Evie, images included. Click Page Layout in the Context Menu. Evie will show you the original PDF page.
Evie will not be able to highlight the spoken sentence while in Page Layout mode, but reading out loud will work just as well as it works in Reflow mode. Text extraction will not be improved, but at least you can see the original document.

Some PDF files could be DRM locked too, or password protected and Evie cannot open them.

FictionBook 2.0 is an open standard similar to EPUB, except it does not support DRM. FB2 books could be compressed and it’s very usual to see files having 2 extensions “.fb2.zip”. Evie can handle both compressed and uncompressed FictionBook files. Evie converts such files and stores them in the Library as EPUB.

Mobipocket eBooks are very popular though the file format went through a series of changes, as Amazon acquired Mobipocket SA. Amazon’s AZW format is identical to the original MOBI format. Then Amazon introduced AZW3 (also known as KF8) which has more features but is still compatible with MOBI readers. Evie converts such files and stores them in the Library as EPUB.

Some MOBI and AZW3 formats could be DRM locked, in which case Evie cannot open them.

This is the newer Microsoft Word file format, called Office Open XML, and is an open standard.
Evie can handle DOCX, but not the older DOC format, which was proprietary so, if you can, always use the new DOCX format. Evie converts such files and stores them in the Library as EPUB.

Some DOCX files could be password protected, in which case Evie cannot open them.

Rich Text is a very old file format, developed by Microsoft, back in the 80’s. Evie converts such files and stores them in the Library as EPUB.

Evie can open HTML and TEXT files from your phone or web pages directly from the internet.

Evie can also accept plain text sent by other apps. If you want to read a simple piece of text in Evie, go to the app from which you want to get the text, and select the portion you want to read in Evie, then wait for the text menu to come up. Then, find the “Send To” option in the menu.
It is possible that the Send To option is not visible and you have to swipe through the menu items to find it. When you do Send To, Android will pop up a message asking you to pick an app to which you want to send the text.
Find Evie in the list and complete the send. Evie will receive the sent data and display the it as if it was an ad-hoc text document.

Some books are Public Domain, which means you can download them, read them and then give them to other people for free. The best known library of free and public eBooks is Project Gutenberg. They have 58,000 books. They maintain a list of the Top 100 Books, selected by the number of times they were downloaded.