# MapleRead SE — user reviews > 164 indexed App Store user reviews of MapleRead SE by Maplepop LLC, rated 4.10/5 from 122 ratings. - Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/mapleread-se/id860169741/reviews - App overview in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/mapleread-se/id860169741.md - Rating breakdown: 5★ 76 · 4★ 19 · 3★ 9 · 2★ 3 · 1★ 15 ## What do users think of MapleRead SE? Overall sentiment: positive **Pros** - 🚀 Highly customizable reading experience - 🔒 Robust library management features - 👍 Seamless integration with Calibre - 👍 Excellent organization and tagging options - 👍 Wide range of font and layout customization - 👍 Responsive and helpful developer support **Cons** - 🐛 Sync issues between devices - 🐛 Occasional crashes and performance problems - 🔍 Complicated interface and setup process - 🔍 Difficult to import large book libraries - 🔍 Limited annotation and highlighting options **Commonly reported bugs** - Freezing and crashing issues, especially on iOS 14 - Inconsistent behavior when switching between portrait and landscape modes - Unreliable OPDS server integration and book downloads **Most requested features** - Automatic reading progress sync across devices - Improved PDF handling and annotation support - Expanded highlighting and note-taking capabilities - Streamlined library import and management - Cleaner and more intuitive user interface ## Newest reviews (15 of 164) ### 3/5 — Need more *2026-06-23, version 6.4.1* Would like to move books around in set in any order I want by tapping and hold at present not able to do this Would also like to draw with Apple Pencil pro on page of book also at this time unable to do this would give five stars if this could be addressed in the next update otherwise excellent app ### 3/5 — Great for reading but OPDS is hard to navigate *2026-01-07* I purchased MapleRead SE primarily for OPDS support (for me calibre integration). The book reader is very nice and functional but when I want to get a book from my Calibre library, the searching window is pretty small making it hard to navigate through the library. If you know what you want and can enter the title in the search bar it works great but if you want to browse your books or filter them for browsing, the navigation is a bit difficult. It may be that I’m not doing something as well as I can but currently the browsing aspect makes me want to just drag a file from my desktop app to iOS….which negates the reason I purchased the app. **Developer response:** The OPDS search bar is actually almost as wide as the screen width. This means that the search bar is much longer in landscape than in portrait orientation. Moreover, you don't need to enter the full book title in the first place. As for browsing your calibre library via OPDS, you can do so by multiple categories: By Newest, By Title, By Authors, By Languages, By Publisher, By Series, and By Tags. Isn't that convenient enough? By the way, the categories and contents are decided by each OPDS server, and not by the app itself. This is analogous to the relationship between a website and a browser. We strongly suggest you to read our online FAQ to fully take advantage of the various ways to import your books. :-) ### 2/5 — Complicated *2025-12-19* Not user friendly ### 4/5 — UI Design should be improved *2025-11-22, version 6.2.1* I'm telling you one thing over and over again: change your user interface. Your user interface looks old and outdated. It looks awful. You should implement iOS 26 “Liquid Glass” design in elegant and minimalist way. ### 3/5 — Need more *2025-11-21* Would like to move books around in set in any order I want by tapping and hold at present not able to do this Would also like to draw with Apple Pencil pro on page of book also at this time unable to do this would give five stars if this could be addressed in the next update otherwise excellent app ### 5/5 — Opens to Black Phe *2025-10-26, version 6.2* My wonderful MapleRead app just recently started to opening to a black page when opening the app. Only with epubs. You tap the black screen and it goes back to the main library list, losing you the book you are in the middle of and having to remember which book you were reading and where in the book you are. Thanks. ### 3/5 — Nice app but books are not synced across devices *2025-10-25* Would have given 5 stars but there seems to be no syncing for books, if I cant access notes I made in a book across devices even after being signed in with the same account, the so called great features of this app are of no use **Developer response:** Book files are not supposed to be synced while notes are, as listed in App Store Description. There are many ways to import the books. See our online FAQ for details. ### 4/5 — Enhancements ? *2025-10-12* Mappleread is really a good application to read ebooks. We can have some wishes, but they are minor enhancements. For example, when we read on a big iPad, it would be better to have three columns. But we can read without them. The big point is a consequence of a big functionality. Mappleread is absolutely able to manipulate a big bulk of books. More than ten thousand, certainly. But the functions to search, to highlight, to find the book are not enough. Even the tags are not always really imported, and search could be placed on the résumé, with keywords or whatever to navigate - or dream- with the books. But finally, thanks. ### 5/5 — This App is Him! (End Game App) *2025-10-07* I was looking for a few simple things in an e-reader app and thankfully my long search is finally over: 1) always on progress bar at the bottom margin 2) Current page number and remaining pages in book (somewhere on the bottom margin) 3) The ability to highlight a word and have TTS pronounce it for me 4) TTS the whole page if I want Numbers 2-4 are relatively easy to find in an e-reader app but Number 1 (out of the 13 ereader apps I tested) only existed on one other ereader app besides MapleReader: FBReader. But the problem with FBReader is that it can't open some epub files I have (that MapleReader and Apple Books opens fine) and it can't open PDFs. EVERY SINGLE OTHER APP I tried only allowed you to see the progress bar if you clicked on the screen which I find highly annoying; I want to instantly know where I am in a book with a progress bar always on display, kind of like how you intuitively know how far you are in a physical book by seeing how the book looks in your hand. All the apps I tried that didn't have the 4 things I wanted above: Kybook 3 Bluefire Reader Readest BookFusion Kindle Yomu Epub Reader FBReader Kobo Reader Pocketbook Reader PureLibro eBOOX ReadEra Once I saw Maple Reader had these features I gladly paid the one-time fee and will donate a tip every so often to encourage further development/help pay developer costs. Thank you for finally giving me the app that checked my 4 most important boxes! ### 4/5 — Great app, with a suggestion for improvement *2025-09-07* Good reading application, allows for tags, customization... the only thing missing is the grouping of series into a single stack in the library for better visibility. We could click on the book series and it would open a sub-library with all the volumes. **Developer response:** Have you tried Sort by Series in Hierarchical Library View? ### 5/5 — Fire superior than anything Apple could do with Books *2025-08-31, version 6.1* MapleReads is in my opinion, the best books app I have come across to date. I have tried many of them, some have come close, but we’re deficient in very important aspects, but this app covers them all. It even syncs with Calibre which is another application that blows Apple Books out of the water. I’ve been an Apple customer since 1989, lived through its ups and then spectacularly idiotic downs. Since Catalina‘s demise both Books and Music , (formally known as iBooks and iTunes), have only become nothing more than front doors to Apple’s purchase and subscription services and nothing more. Apple has done nothing of meaning with those applications in roughly two decades, except to make them look cleaner and more attractive. Books is actually nothing more than a glorified but very limited database application. Whereas the common phrase “Apple is so elegant!”, is commonly concerned, that once applied to its actual product functionality. In the past ten to fifteen years it now only applies to how things appear. The operating system and applications may look pretty and well slicked but there has been no real progress or improvements in functionality. Bugs that have been reported for years go ignored and features that are requested are “piffled”at. Third party apps do not work as well as they once did and it appears that there are increasing numbers of limitations and blocks to how they once worked with Apple’s devices. I would love to go on about iOS 16, but that would be repetitive. I suspect these issues with third party applications becoming more tedious and difficult to use is because whereas once upon a time, Steve Jobs had opened the OS to third party developers. However, the current CEO, Tim Cook has closed it again. Apple appears to be moving backwards toward an its business practices of the 1990’s. And we know just how well that worked out for them. MapleReads is phenomenal. I could write on and on about its many attributes, but your eyes would glaze over and all I can say is to simply download one of the smaller limited versions as I did and give it a chance. It offers an immense array of features and yet not so many that you would get lost in it. ### 5/5 — The best (and actively developed) reading app! *2025-08-29* I‘ve been using this app for a while now and am still happy to say that I never found a reading app close as good as this one! Actually, when I found a tiny feature that I was missing, I contacted the developers and within short time, an update added what I had been missing. Absolutely well-made and one of those apps that get better not because they need to, but because they evolve with users‘ needs. ### 5/5 — Extraordinarily practical *2025-08-11* This is the ideal book reader for epubs and the most useful I have encountered for PDFs. ### 5/5 — Best epub reader for multiple languages *2025-08-10, version 6.0* Coming from Android had a trouble finding best epub reader, especially when you normally don’t read in English. I read in Georgian, ios doesn’t have much variety of Georgian fonts, I mean there is only one stock font for Georgian and that’s it. In this reader you can embed any font you want from web. There are very many options for configuration, the only thing I miss is a page break for the new chapter, I need it sometimes very much, Overall love the app, have not regretted buying it at all. ### 4/5 — Please get back to me as soon as possible from the production team! *2025-08-02, version 6.0* Can't even annotate PDF files? The content paging is also incomplete...even the underline function is not available? Please expand these functions as soon as possible! Functions do not have to be too trivial review, more need to be compatible and equal, thank you. ## Most critical reviews (10 lowest-rated) ### 1/5 — Unhelpful *2026-05-23* Despite my best attempts, I have been unable to synch iPad library with my iPhone. I enquired with the help desk and I got an unhelpful reply, redirecting me to online help, which I had read already, but written so cryptically that I couldn’t get it working. By the way, the response took weeks to arrive. For single device use it might be ok, but for multiple devices it’s cumbersome and help desk unhelpful. **Developer response:** You ask about why books are not automatically sync'ed from your iPhone to your iPad, or vice versa. It is because they are not supposed to happen in the first place. This is listed on both the App Store description page, and our website. ### 1/5 — Fails to import more than half of my books *2026-05-17, version 6.4* I got the paid version since the app did better than Books in terms of comics view. But when I actually went and import them, more than half of the books failed to import woth very vague errors saying “Error creating book.” Not helpful, as the failed ones included the ones whose MB were lower than the ones that are already imported. Tried every way possible - over wifi, PC, cloud, share through files, etc. Now I’m sitting here wondering what’s the use of paying for something I can’t even use 😭 ### 1/5 — Does Not Open Imported Books *2026-03-08* I import books and some won’t show up on the shelf. If I try to import it again, it still doesn’t show up and says it’s duplicated. I also cannot open the book with the app but it opens normally on other apps. This doesn’t happen with all books and sometimes the app will function normally 1 day and then the next day a book will be missing. I wish Moonreader+ was on the app store because I hate this app. update: I am in the all books tab. I see the parenthesis say 8 books but it only shows 5 covers. It seems to only exclude pdfs. I have fixed this by immediately moving pdfs to a new shelf and tagging them after import. If I don’t, they do not show up on the shelf and I am not able to find them again once they are out of the queue. **Developer response:** You’ve probably forgot to switch the current book set back to All Books (the default) after switching to another book set. Don’t hesitate to contact us by email if you need more help. Update: make sure you have selected All in Tag Filter. ### 1/5 — Gave Up Trying to Download an Existing Library *2026-01-21, version 6.2.2* I have over 3000 epub books and have spent four hours trying to figure out how to do it. $9 wasted. MapleRead - make this process easier. ### 1/5 — Worst UI Ever. *2025-08-02* Such a terrible app. Unintuitive, clunky, and does not work as expected. Total waste of money. Very disappointed. ### 1/5 — Look in my eyes *2025-07-13, version 6.0* — it’s almost perfect! You guys are amazing! I just have a small request: when reading PDFs, （for non-scroll-view mode）could you make the page margins black when the aspect ratio of the PDF doesn’t match the screen, just like in Apple Books? It would really help me focus better while reading. Thank you so much! 🙏 Realy， it worth 5 star. ### 1/5 — SERIOUS PROBLEMS *2025-06-04, version 5.9* I have been using the app for years and have usually been happy. However now there are two serious problems 1. Drain on battery life In the last few months it has been a serious drain on my battery life for my IPad 5th generation. When I am using it without maple, I still get my 10 hrs battery life. When I am ONLY using Maple, it drops down to 3 hours. What is causing such a massive drain? All I am doing is reading and with no other reading app is that happening 2. Batch import via OPDS/ HTML server Since the last upgrade, I can no longer use the batch import. I can import each file separately but when using the batch import, maple crashes. Contacting support seems to impossible....so wait and check if any if these problems can be fixed before spending money on it. Don't get me wrong, the app in general is good but it appears to be killing the battery of my Ipad Air, which is supposed to have about 10 hrs battery life. I am only reading with Mapleread for about 3 1/2 hrs and I am out of juice. ### 1/5 — Unterirdische Aufmachung *2025-02-19* UI aus der Hölle. Man findet nichts. Völlig verkompliziert und schlecht designed. Finger weg. ### 1/5 — Frustrating and useless *2024-11-11, version 5.7* I can’t get it to see my files at all~tried using iPad files, setting up a folder - nothing.i also have Calibre running on my network and it doesn’t see that either ### 1/5 — Extrem umständlich und unintuitiv *2024-04-10* Selten eine so schlechte GUI erlebt. Beispiel: Um einem Buch eine Serie oder Reihe zuzuordnen muss man: 1. lange auf den Buchtitel tippen, 2. im Menü "Get Info" wählen, 3. rechts oben auf "Edit" tippen, 4. in der Mitte auf "Series" tippen, 5. im folgenden Menü "Edit" wählen, 6. in die aufpoppende Schreibfläche tippen, um die Tastatur zu aktivieren, 7. den Reihentitel eintragen, 8. die Schreibfläche schließen, 9. auf "Volume" klicken, 10. im Menü "Edit" wählen, 11. in die aufpoppende Schreibfläche tippen, um die Tastatur zu aktivieren, 12. die Reihennummer eintragen, 13. die Schreibfläche schließen, 14. oben rechts auf "Save" tippen. Der Rest ist auch nicht besser. **Developer response:** We feel your frustration, but we honestly think that your review is an over-generalization. All users are welcome to try out MapleRead features and GUI with our free edition, MapleRead CX. The GUI of all 3 apps of the family are the same. Moreover, the need to edit the book info may be mitigated if the book is properly imported in the first place. For more details, please see our online FAQ. ## Most praised reviews (10 highest-rated) ### 5/5 — Fantastic - It’s simply a legendary class book reader *2026-06-22, version 6.4.1* Ok where do I begin? Cost - extremely reasonable. No subscription nightmares - u own it outright. There’s even different versions of the app to suit different needs. Personally I highly recommend the SE version. MapleRead is highly customisable and for convenience sake, bulk import is a breeze. There’s support for many cloud drives but most importantly for ‘Calibre’. Calibre is the amazing open source way to manage ur ebook & manga libraries. Back to MapleRead, only today did I discover they’d fixed & have a super easy way to bulk import books using standard Apple’s File App. There’s all ur typical ways to add ur own fonts, backgrounds, covers. Just loads of cool Nic-Nacs for u all to tinker with :) I just loathe DRM, it’s so incredibly offensive. That’s why I just love Calibre (who deals with DRM) so I can manage & read my purchased books exactly the way I desire. I’m not bound to some store’s app, only to find out one day, when the store abandons that app, I also lose access to all my books. Things I buy ought to be owned by me don’t u agree? U know, just like a physical book has always been! BTW MapleRead guys are always updating and adding new features (at no extra cost), although I love dropping them a donation/coffee every now and again. Sure beats loathsome subscriptions doesn’t it 9/10 ### 5/5 — This app is an incredible secret! *2026-05-03, version 6.3* Why don’t more people know about MapleRead? I’ve been using this now for several years and couldn’t ever go back to Apple’s app. No way. Updates are regular and it truly deserves to be better known. A++++ Edit 12/21/2025: The best has gotten even better. I absolutely LOVE this app! ### 5/5 — Kick's Apple Books App's Digital Butt *2026-02-28* There aren't enough words to describe how much i hate the Apple Books App. What a piece of trash. Maple read SE is complicated but such an improvement. I can see my important books and documents on the first page and set up my very own tags. What a revolution! And thanks for eschewing the subscription model. That doesn't wash with me. Having said that: DUDE you need to learn how to design a GUI. **Developer response:** Regarding your comment about a unified "Annotations" view — a place where all highlights and notes across a book can be seen together, we think this feature has been available for years. Please visit www.maplepop.com, and look at Overview | Organize & Search Notes. You may also contact us by email if you need more help. ### 5/5 — Worth the 💰 *2026-02-23* I’m loving the app on my iPad Pro 13in (m5), and features are unlimited. Love that I can have my book read to me when I’m busy at home and can’t physically read. I also love the fact that I can pick classic book to transform my book into an actual look alike physical book. If it’s possible work on adding page turn sounds. Using the classic book feature and page turn sounds will most definitely take digital reading to another level. (my opinion) Endless features keep the updates coming! ### 5/5 — Kick's Apple Books App's Digital Butt *2026-01-28, version 6.2.2* There aren't enough words to describe how much i hate the Apple Books App. What a piece of trash. Maple read SE is complicated but such an improvement. I can see my important books and documents on the first page and set up my very own tags. What a revolution! And thanks for eschewing the subscription model. That doesn't wash with me. Having said that: DUDE you need to learn how to design a GUI. ### 5/5 — The one and only! *2026-01-17* First, let it be known, this is only my second review on the App Store in the past 20 years. In that period of time I have ventured to find an epub reader that would provide maximum utility, ease of library management and a user interface that is both pleasing to the eye and intuitively formatted. I have struggled over the years to manage my rather large e-book library, now exceeding 10,000 books. As you can imagine, the size of the library has posed many problems in the traditional Apple Books ((formally iBooks) application, which requires iCloud storage for there to be full and potentially ready Accessibility to books as required across devices. Unfortunately, iCloud has a notorious habit of, offloading books from the device to the cloud significantly encumbering accessibility to books as may be needed. Whether it be the extremely efficient library management, particularly of such a large volume of books, it’s ease, importation and exportation of books, the tailoring to personal needs as it relates to user interface (the ability to alter the size of the image or text when viewing the library, in list or grid mode, means to access meta data, change e-book covers, adjust title or author or series as needed), multiple options for customizing the organization of the library (by author, by title, date added/read/modified, series, and tags for grouping by topic or relevancy) or the reading experience (adjusting, text size, text in paragraph spacing, page look and feel/animation) [to name just a few] together with the developers ongoing and regular attention to an effort to maintain this application at the cutting edge of the e-book reading experience, there is nothing that holds a candle to this application anywhere, for any device, at any time past or present! Not withstanding all of my praise and merits of this application, two small tweaks to its interface and E pub reader would seal the deal: the option to “highlight” text with underlining as is offered in some other E pub readers, and a larger size size to the book covers viewable in the various collections and main interface. That being said, subsequent to my composing this review just over 30 days ago, the ability to change the scene when viewing Books in the various collections individually or collectively, no longer works, unless the viewing mode is switched to dark. I would hope product support and developers would look into this ongoing and disturbing irregularity as of late. ### 5/5 — The best Marvin replacement for me. *2026-01-14* I was a loyal Marvin user for over 13 years. Kris built a great app in Marvin and my devotion was absolute. I had figured out how to keep Marvin working on my devices. . . until 26.2, which completely kills the app. Like many, I went on a desperate hunt. For me, only Mapleread and Readest came close to meeting my needs. Both allow you to customize the book interface to almost Marvin levels. Mapleread beats Readest for me in a few key areas: 1. Mapleread allows you to download multiple titles from your opds catalog. Readest only allows one download at a time. 2. While I appreciate the open source collaborative approach to Readest feature development, I want a professionally developed and maintained app. Readest doesn’t have any real documentation and support on reddit is ok, but not preferred. With Mapleread, I emailed the support alias with a question about using a specific font—I received a response and my request was addressed in the most recent release. If you’re looking for something to replace Marvin, I recommend Mapleread. I’m happy to have found a home for my ebooks. I hope they’ll continue to add feature requests from the Marvin loyalists like me! ### 5/5 — This app is an incredible secret! *2025-12-21, version 6.2.1* Why don’t more people know about MapleRead? I’ve been using this now for several years and couldn’t ever go back to Apple’s app. No way. Updates are regular and it truly deserves to be better known. A++++ Edit 12/21/2025: The best has gotten even better. I absolutely LOVE this app! ### 5/5 — Far superior than anything Apple could do with Books *2025-12-04, version 6.2.1* MapleReads is in my opinion, the best books app I have come across to date. I have tried many of them, some have come close, but we’re deficient in very important aspects, but this app covers them all. It even syncs with Calibre which is another application that blows Apple Books out of the water. I’ve been an Apple customer since 1989, lived through its ups and then spectacularly idiotic downs. Since Catalina‘s demise both Books and Music , (formally known as iBooks and iTunes), have only become nothing more than front doors to Apple’s purchase and subscription services and nothing more. Apple has done nothing of meaning with those applications in roughly two decades, except to make them look cleaner and more attractive. Books is actually nothing more than a glorified but very limited database application. In the past ten to fifteen years their computers have become nothing more than glorified and expensive entertainment devices. Great if you want to stream movies, music, or peruse the internet mindlessly, but not much else. The operating system and applications may look pretty and well slicked but there has been no real progress or improvements in functionality. Bugs that have been reported for years go ignored and features that are requested are “piffled”at. In many ways it reminds me of windows do back in 2005. Their ecosystem imprisons you. Unless you are ok with doing things the way apple dictates, you will very quickly become frustrated. It was not nearly this bad a decade or more ago, but it’s all about funneling you into subscriptions and content purchases. In other words, becoming a human debit card for apple to live off of for the rest of your life if you’re silly enough to accept that. Third party apps do not work as well as they once did and it appears that there are increasing numbers of limitations and blocks to how they once worked with Apple’s devices. I would love to go on about iOS 16, but that would be repetitive. I suspect these issues with third party applications becoming more tedious and difficult to use is because whereas once upon a time, Steve Jobs had opened the OS to third party developers. However, the current CEO, Tim Cook has closed it again. Apple appears to be moving backwards toward an its business practices of the 1990’s. And we know just how well that worked out for them. MapleReads is phenomenal. I could write on and on about its many attributes, but your eyes would glaze over and all I can say is to simply download one of the smaller limited versions as I did and give it a chance. It offers an immense array of features and yet not so many that you would get lost in it. ### 5/5 — Still the best *2025-11-08, version 6.2* Underrated epub app, wish there were better AI natural voices even if it's an add-on subscription. --- *Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-09-01.*