Over the past couple years, I’ve abandoned reading books either in print or on dedicated ereaders in favor of only reading books on my Android phone. It wasn’t easy finding the exact set of apps that would let me read books the way I prefer, but in the end I have a system that works for me and generally lets me read more books than I would be otherwise with my limited time.

Hardware – Samsung Galaxy Note 2

On the hardware side, I use a Galaxy Note 2. The Note 2 has a 5.5″ screen which I’ve found is good enough for reading books. I’ve also added a 64gb micro-SD card so I have plenty of space for storing as many books as I could realistically ever read in a lifetime. I also tend to carry around 2-3 spare batteries, as I prefer to set the brightness to near maximum and between reading books, Twitter and the numerous other things I do with my phone, I tend to drain the battery by the end of a working day.

The best part of the Galaxy Note series, however, the S Pen. When I bought the phone, I assumed the S Pen was some stupid Samsung gimmick, and in many ways it is. But with the right app, the S Pen allows me to easily highlight and annotate passages in the books I am reading. This is very close to a must have for me, as it is much more convenient than selecting/highlight or annotating using just a finger.

The S Pen may have started out as another Samsung gimmick, but for me it makes it much easier to read a book on my phone in much the same way I would have read a physical book.

Services – Dropbox

I use Dropbox to sync my ebooks and annotations back and forth between my phone and my computer using a 3rd party app. Obviously you don’t have to sync, but I like to add new ebooks to my phone by simply dropping them in a Dropbox folder. Makes it dead simple, and I don’t have to worry about backing up the phone manually to my computer, etc.

Apps – Dropsync, Moon+ Reader, Goodreads

Dropsync – Dropsync is a 3rd party app for syncing files from Dropbox to an Android phone that works much better than the official app. Dropsync does full two-way syncing, so changes I make in my /books/ folder on my phone get synced instantly to Dropbox. It also makes it easy to sync just a specific folder, and determine when that folder gets synced. For example, I could opt to have my /books/ folder sync over wireless and 4G, but have my music folder only sync when I am connected to wifi.

Moon+ Reader Pro – this is the goofiest name for reader software ever, but it is also hands down the best reader software I’ve ever used. This has so many options that you can configure the reading experience to a degree I have yet to see on any competing reader software.

I point the Moon+ software to my SD card’s /books/ folder and it does periodic scans and automatic importing of any new books synced through Dropsync.

I also prefer Moon+ method of allowing me to highlight and annotate books. Unlike a lot of other reader software out there, Moon+ also makes it easy to export or share some or even all of the highlights and annotations to other apps.

Searching for books is fairly robust, as Moon+ will let me search on numerous metadata fields, allow me to edit that metadata, and organize books into collections, etc.

I currently have 7000 books on my phone in ePub format, and I’ve never noticed any sort of sluggish performance when searching for or browsing through books. The developers of Moon+ have thought thoroughly about everything that comes with reading a book on a mobile device, and come up with options and solutions for almost every issue you can think of.

Goodreads – Finally, use the GoodReads app on my phone to keep track of my progress as I am reading a book. I’m not really a fan of Goodreads itself, but the Goodreads site does produce an RSS feed of progress updates that I then import into a WordPress site automatically to track my reading habits.