The distinction that ruins this search
When you search for an EPUB reader with translation, you get two categories of app jumbled together, and they do opposite things. Most people download the wrong one, get frustrated, and conclude the category doesn't work.
Whole-book translators take your EPUB and translate the entire thing, producing a bilingual or translated file. You end up with the book in a language you already understand.
Tap-a-word readers leave the book in the original language and give you a dictionary on tap. You stay in the foreign text; help is one touch away.
If you're learning a language, you almost certainly want the second kind, and a lot of what ranks for this search is the first kind. Translating the whole book means you are, in the end, reading a translation, which is a fine thing to do but is not language learning. You want the friction of the original with the safety net underneath.
Everything below is sorted on that line.
Tap-a-word readers (what a learner wants)
These leave the text alone and let you tap.
| App | Price (July 2026) | Saves vocabulary | Imports | Platforms |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simply Fluent | Free; €7.99/mo, €59.99/yr | Yes, and shown on the page next time | EPUB, PDF, text (+ own library) | iOS, Android |
| SmartBook | $1.99/mo, $19.99/yr, $24.99 PRO | Yes, Anki export | fb2, epub, txt | iOS, Mac |
| Linga | $5.49/mo, $54.90/yr, $109.99 lifetime | Yes, with review | EPUB, PDF, MOBI, FB2, TXT | iOS, Mac |
| Readlang | $6/mo, $48/yr | Yes | DRM-free EPUB, txt. No PDF | Web only |
| LingQ | $14.99/mo, $119.99/yr | Yes, full tracking | Import via extension | Web, iOS, Android |
| Polyglot Reader | "Free to start", price not published | Yes, grouped by book | PDF, ePub, FB2, RTF, TXT | iOS |
| Lingible | Free core; Plus price not published | Yes | EPUB, PDF, MOBI, TXT, FB2 | iOS, Android |
The cheap one: SmartBook
At $1.99/month (or $24.99 once for PRO), SmartBook is the cheapest serious option in this category, and it exports to Anki, which matters if you already run a review system. iOS and Mac only.
The lifetime one: Linga
$109.99 once, if you'd rather not rent software forever. Reads essentially every format, saves vocabulary with spaced repetition, and works across iPhone, iPad and Mac. If you're confident you'll still be learning this language in three years, the lifetime price beats every subscription here.
The web one: Readlang
$6/month, and it reads DRM-free EPUBs you upload. Two things to know that its own marketing obscures:
- It does not read PDFs. EPUB and plain text only.
- There is no native mobile app. The homepage mentions "iOS and Android", but no first-party Readlang app exists in either store. It's the browser and mobile web.
Its real strength isn't books at all: the browser extension makes any web page tappable, which is a wider surface than any book reader.
The thorough one: LingQ
The most complete vocabulary system here, and the most expensive at $14.99/month (US pricing, as of July 2026, and it varies by region). Every word carries a known/unknown state that follows you across everything you read. If you want the app to model your vocabulary rather than just define words, LingQ is better at that than anything else on this list, including us.
Ours: Simply Fluent
Free to start, no card. €7.99/month or €59.99/year.
Import an EPUB or PDF and read it. Tap a word and you get the meaning that fits that sentence, not the dictionary's first entry, and it catches expressions and idioms rather than translating word by word.
The difference from everything else in this table: save a translation once and it appears above that word from then on, on every page, in every book. It's in your dictionary and your flashcards too, weighted toward the words you keep meeting, but you get the benefit without leaving the book: the word is simply readable next time. And when you know it, you mark it memorized and the translation stops appearing. The highlight remains, so you can reveal the translation again whenever the word deserts you. The page clears at the pace you genuinely learn, and nothing is ever taken away.
Where we lose: SmartBook is cheaper. Linga has a lifetime option and reads more formats. LingQ tracks vocabulary more rigorously. Readlang covers the whole web. Pick against those honestly.
Whole-book translators (probably not what you want)
For completeness, because these rank for the same searches.
Apps like EPUB Translator Bilingual (free, or $2.99/month) take your file and translate the whole thing, producing a bilingual or fully translated book. There is no tap-a-word lookup and no vocabulary saving.
There's a legitimate use for this: you want to read a book that has never been translated into your language, and you want to read it, not study it. That's a real need and these tools serve it.
But if your goal is learning, this is the trap. A fully translated book teaches you nothing, because you never engage with the original. You'll finish it feeling like you read a foreign novel, and your target-language vocabulary will be exactly where it started.
The part nobody warns you about: you may not have a file at all
Every app in the table above needs an EPUB. So you go to buy one, and discover the actual problem, which is worse than the one you were expecting.
It isn't just that books from Amazon, Apple and Kobo are DRM-protected, so the file won't open anywhere else. It's that on most of these platforms you never receive a file in the first place. There's no download button. The book exists inside their app, on their account, on their terms. You didn't buy a book so much as a licence to look at one.
That is not a hypothetical distinction. In 2009, Amazon remotely deleted copies of Orwell's 1984 from customers' Kindles over a rights dispute with the seller. They refunded everyone, Jeff Bezos publicly called the decision "stupid, thoughtless, and self-inflicted", and Amazon said it changed its systems so it wouldn't do that again. Fine. But the reason it was possible hasn't changed: the book was never really on the device in a way that belonged to you.
So, a sentence worth sitting with: you probably don't own most of the ebooks you've paid for, and that is precisely why you can't read them in whichever app you'd prefer.
What that leaves you, realistically:
- Public-domain books. Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, Wikisource. Free, DRM-free, downloadable, yours. For a language learner this is a much bigger library than it sounds: most of the canon is here.
- DRM-free sellers. Some publishers and stores sell you a real EPUB that stays yours.
- A library that ships you the book. Any reading app with its own catalogue avoids the problem entirely, because there's nothing to source.
We built Simply Fluent around that last point, partly for this reason. You can import your own EPUB or PDF, and plenty of people do. But you don't have to go and fight a storefront to start reading, because there's a library in the app: graded short stories written to a level from A1 upward, and modernized classics, full-length Austen, Verne and Conan Doyle with the archaic language rewritten into modern prose. Public-domain works are also, conveniently, the ones nobody can take away from you.
Kindle sidesteps the whole problem in the opposite direction: the books are already in the ecosystem, so there's nothing to sideload. The catch is that you're then reading inside Amazon's ecosystem, with the language tools Amazon gives you, which are weaker than most people assume. We went through that properly in our Kindle piece, including the claim everyone repeats about it that turns out to be false.
The short version
- Learning a language: get a tap-a-word reader. SmartBook if you want cheap, Linga if you want to buy once, LingQ if you want rigorous tracking, Simply Fluent if you want to read novels and never look the same word up twice.
- You just want to read an untranslated book: a whole-book translator is the right tool, and you're not doing anything wrong.
- Before any of it: check you can get the file at all. On most stores you never receive one, so the book can't leave their app. Public-domain sources, DRM-free sellers, or an app with its own library are the ways around it.
