Thorium Reader for Mac
Easy to use EPUB reading app.
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Thorium Reader overview
Thorium Reader is an easy to use EPUB reading application for Windows 10/10S, MacOS and Linux. After importing e-books from a directory or OPDS feed, you'll be able to read on any screen size, customize layout settings, navigate via the table of contents or page list, set bookmarks ... A great care is taken to ensure the accessibility of the application for visual impaired people using NVDA, JAWS or Narrator.
Free application. No ads. No private data flowing anywhere. Thorium is available in many languages and is accessible for visually impaired and dyslexic people.
This project is in constant evolution, corrections and new features will be added soon and your support is welcome for that. The application is based on the open-source Readium Desktop toolkit.
What's new in version 3.4.0
- Upgraded to Electron v41, Chromium v146, NodeJS v24
- Updated translations
- Fixed accessibility issues with screen reader heading hierarchy and keyboard tab cycling order
- New feature: filtering and sorting directly in the publication "grid" mode of the library window (complements existing "table" view functionality)
- New feature: favorite OPDS feed sorting
- New feature: keyboard shortcut "export to HTML" function
- Updated feature: the LCP passphrase input text field can now show unmasked clear text
- Fixed OPDS "breadcrumb" user interface affordance
- Fixed MathML support, MathJax could not be activated
- Fixed a zoom issue with "fixed layout" / pre-paginated EPUBs
- Fix in TTS readaloud and EPUB Media Overlays, the temporary disabling of popup footnotes wasn't being restored properly, as well as the notes highlights (annotations and bookmarks)
- Fixed MacOS issue when bringing re-activating the application to bring the reader window into the foreground (over the library window)
- Fixed "customization profiles" (new feature which was broken on Windows in version 3.3.0). Reminder: this feature offers an alternative to forking the Thorium Desktop codebase, via a plugin mechanism that declaratively expresses modifications to "vanilla" Thorium Desktop reader (color themes, bundled publications and feeds, application logo, etc.)
- Fixed notification toasts which were sometimes incorrectly terminated
- Fix: LCP passphrase prompt was incorrectly displayed when imported protected publications (directly as EPUB or via LCPL) were added and non-already existing in the bookshelf (but with an existing cached valid passphrase based on provider mapping)
- Fix: network requests at application launch (i.e. telemetry ping and version check) could potentially delay the boot process and compromise the application "ready" state
- Fixed bookshelf table layour, translated column headers.
- Fix: in version 3.3.0 a more performant filesystem persistence of "notes" (i.e. annotations and bookmarks) was introduced, using a dedicated SQLite database separate from other scopes of application state. Backward compatibility with the JSON format of older versions of the application was preserved but this caused application shutdown to be very slow (sometimes even hanging and ultimately crashing). In version 3.4.0, the backward compatibility is removed and consequently users are advised to manually backup their notes when they wish to revert to an older version of Thorium Desktop reader
- Fix: under the hood, further changes to filesystem persistence (i.e. preservation of application state) were introduced in order to improve performance and hopefully address rare data loss issues experienced by some Windows users. The user interface indicates missing publications and additional logging is now available for remote troubleshooting (user-accessible text files created in Thorium Desktop's application data folder). This is groundwork for a planned future feature that will allow users to store publications inside an arbitrary folder (this might be useful to address filesystem storage limitations, notably on Windows where a large amount of ebooks / audiobooks could cause the operating system to interfere with application data and potentially corrupt Thorium Desktop's internal database)
Thorium Reader for Mac
Free
In English
Version 3.4.0
What users say about Thorium Reader
Features: 5.0
Fantastic features. This is the only ePub reader which allows configuration on a per document basis. This is very important for reading poetry or certain scientific texts. Line-length, margins, letter spacing – the options are the useful ones and they are well laid-out.
Reliability: 4.0
Thorium is built on Mozilla code so there's very solid underpinnings here. Memory use is excessive like all browser based apps, but significantly better than electron (720 MB on my Mac Studio with 64GB memory now, after several days and with four documents open).
Customer support: 5.0
The project appears to be well-managed with an attractive home page, downloads available free standing and on the app store. I take the free standing download. Github provdes the project underpinnings.
Other user ratings:
Value | 5.0
Ease of use | 4.0
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What customers like
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(3 Reviews of Thorium Reader)
Comments
User Ratings
Feb 23, 2026
Version: 3.0.0
v3.3.0 is the current version, from 2025-12: "Minimum system requirements: macOS (Monterey and up): Electron provides 64-bit Intel and Apple Silicon / ARM binaries for macOS." Supported publication formats: ePub (including ePub3), Daisy, PDF, Audiobooks (LPF), and Divina (visual narrative format). Using Text-To-Speech is much easier than Kindle, along with every other feature, except: The GUI remains the same, with clunky icons (some of which have no hot-help to identify them) and buried Preferences. It's identical to the Windows version. When I can use Thorium instead of annoying Kindle, I will.
Jun 29, 2024
Version: 3.0.0
First Impressions: The clunk-element is fairly high. Starting with the dev's website: Words are spelled wrong, what should download the Thorium Reader Documentation dumps you to a raw code page, IOW bad HTML. (To save you suffering, the direct download of the v3 Doc is https://rawcdn.githack.com/edrlab/publications/main/thorium3-documentation/sources/en.epub ). That documentation is a work-in-progress, and it shows. Embedded are links the lead to oblivion, rather than what you're searching for. The bookmarking is primitive with no visible indicator, only an available bookmark number listing. Text highlighting is in the wrong color, different from what the Documenation claims. The annotation system requires permanently highlighting text with the annotation buried behind it. TEXT-TO-SPEECH: It works inside the app itself if you dig around and change to a reasonable voice. But you might want to skip it and use Apple's macOS TTS instead via highlighting and hitting your chosen reading key command. You'll have better reading speed control. Where TTS typically falls down is DRM (Digital Right Manglement, IMHO) limitation of what you can TTS within books. You can TTS read only so far then you're locked out. They're paranoid you're going to copy/paste their copyrighted work elsewhere, which is silly seeing as OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is free and easy, resulting in the same thing. I'll still have to play with a DRM limited ePub to see if this dopey game is part of Thorium. OVERALL, Thorium Reader is just as clunky as every other ePub reader. It breaks Apple's GUI rules. It's settings are scattered and obscure. The learning curve is not straight forward, making it NOT easy to use for newbies. If it overcomes the DRM crappage, I'll add another star. But for now, this is just another average clunky ePub reader. At least its free. 😕
