Join millions of booklovers across the globe and access your very own portable reading world. Go shelf-less and take your reading adventures on the go. With over 5 million titles to choose from, there’s something for every type of reader and listener.
Introducing audiobooks from Kobo—our brand new expertly curated collection. Discover the best deal on audiobooks when you subscribe. You earn Kobo Super Points every purchase. With all your eBooks and audiobooks together, the Kobo App is all you need.**
The Kobo App allows you to browse our growing collection of the world’s best eBooks, audiobooks, graphic novels, and children’s books, to enjoy instantly on your smartphone or tablet. Search by author, title, topic or genre to discover your next great read.
Check out Kobo’s free eBook selection to discover a new favourite.
Take a look at our most popular and trending eBooks, updated hourly!
Browse now on the Kobo website.
The Kobo App makes reading even more comfortable and convenient:
• Customize the way you read. Enjoy crisp, clear text in the size and style you prefer. Try Night Mode to make reading easier on your eyes before bedtime, and lock the screen in portrait or landscape mode.
• Our beautifully designed, easy-to-use player makes it simple for you to move through your audiobook with a single touch. Never worry about losing your spot, and see how much time is left at a glance. Schedule it to turn off after a set amount of time—perfect for listening before going to sleep.
• Discover recommendations just for you for eBooks and audiobooks we think you’ll love. Read thousands of free eBook previews or listen to audiobook samples to help you find your next favourite.
• Start reading on one device and pick up on another. The Kobo App always remembers where you left off, so you can keep reading across all your devices.
• Rate and review the books you’ve read or read reviews from booklovers like you!
• Read in English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, or Japanese.
**Audiobooks available in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. You can listen to audiobooks on smartphones and tablets running Android version 4.4 or higher.
If you’re hoping to use this app as an alternative to Audible, don’t. It’s very unreliable and the quality of the audio is very tingy. When I’m listening to a book, it stops playing about every 30 minutes or so. It has nothing to do with notifications or any issue I can find. I’ve reinstalled it, restarted my phone, and other basic troubleshooting I do for other apps. Nothing seems to change it. The search feature on the app is also terrible. I will be going to another service.
It is a great app for reading e-books. However when it come to listening audiobooks, there are some bugs. I am a subscriber to the Kobo Plus plan with Audiobooks. Audiobooks player randomly stops playing once the phone goes into lock mode. You have to unlock the phone in order to resume playing the audio book. Not sure if anyone else experiences this issue. Please fix it.
The Android version of the Kobo app is usable, but far behind the experience on Kobo devices. There are several, basic functions which are poorly implemented or altogether missing. In particular, formatting options are very sparse. There appears to be no way to adjust margins or to justify text. Books which have neatly justified right margins on a Kobo reader, for example, are left jagged in the Android app. While the app is not a complete disaster, there is much room for improvement.
I’ve seen ebooks on here I couldn’t find with Amazon or Google. Also the layout of the user interface I think is a little better than Google or Amazon. I haven’t had to contact customer support but it can’t be worse than the support for the Amazon Kindle app. Edit I don’t think the comic reader is better though. The features with comixology and play books are better. They have a zoom to panel and zoom speech bubble features that you can scroll with volume buttons.
First, it does the job. You can read books with it and it has the basic features necessary. It doesn’t crash. However, it doesn’t handle books with multiple languages (a foreign language and the translation) well. It doesn’t allow control over justification, so a book I’m reading got misinterpreted as centered. I’m forced to read the whole book with all text centered! Finally, it should be easier to turn pages. With the Kobo reader you can just tap to turn the page. This requires a long stroke.
App reading functions just fine, but Kobo store frustrating. It takes the app a bit to sync up with the e-reader, and vice versa. Overall a good experience though until recently, when I can’t make any purchases in app. It says every book is “not available in my country” if I try to make a purchase in app.
Great app and has lots of good audiobooks, but for some reason now it will just randomly stop working and I have to manually go back in and get the audiobook to play, but sometimes it will go back an hour or so. The only way to prevent that is to constantly have the app open and on screen at all times.
This used to be a simple and effective app, but with the latest update it’s ripe with bugs. You can’t change the playback speed. Doesn’t show up on my car for Bluetooth anymore so no pause function works, I can’t see the time elapsed, etc. How could they release an update with such simple bugs?? Good thing I only have an hour left of my audiobook and can ditch this app after, but it really sucks to go back to listening to normal speed!!
I bought extra audiobooks because the 1 credit a month was quite enough. I had 2 left over but it won’t let me use them. I talked with support and they seemed to have fixed it. Fast forward to the next time I want to use a credit and same problem appears. The difference is this time support just kept telling me I didn’t have any credits even with me showing them screen shots of the 2 audio credits I still had. Needless to say don’t waste your time or money.
Better than Audible! Very well featured app that has always worked reliably for me. One thing that would make it better is the ability to break up audiobook downloads. This is an option on Overdrive and is really nice for being able to listen to the start of the book while the rest is downloading as well as conserving spaced used on your phone.
With the roll back of the May update, this is again my favorite e-book reading app. Most others have similar features like volume key page turning and portrait lock. But, this one has the best library system of the few I’ve tried with being able to group them into genres or authors and it’s easy to find the summary if you want to reread one that you don’t remember too well.
I really miss the Audible app. So much easier to navigate, faster downloads, better user interface. I may have to switch back. Update: The lack of ability to manually set a boomark became a major problem. Unless you are uber careful, you will end up accidentally advancing or rewinding on the player timeline. Getting back to where you were is painful and time consuming. This happens more often than you would expect because of the layout of the player controls and menu to table of contents.
Kobo was the first digital book app I used. Really enjoyed it. I haven’t used it for awhile until just recently I wanted to go back and re-read some of my books. First it told me I had no books, finally found them. Finally got it to open but it is so sluggish!! I can’t get pages to turn! I tried to change the font and style and again it took forever to just get the page to turn!! If I didn’t have so many of my favorite books on the app I would definitely uninstall it and strictly use Kindle!
Seems to work well so far. Update: The July 2022 update is frustrating. I can’t get the app to work effectively with my Bluetooth headphones. The pause and fast forward commands just don’t work when I use the buttons on my headphones. The most frustrating part of buying Kobo audiobooks is that I can only listen to the audiobooks using the Kobo app. If I could actually download the books into an app that is functional, I would consider keeping my subscription.
It’s a service that is cheaper than it’s competitors however this means you get a crashing app that doesn’t always work as you’d expect. When you type in the search query for a book that you know is available on audio book.. It only shows you Ebooks! So you have to go back to the audio book tab, and manually type your search out again.. As it doesn’t save SEARCH HISTORY. I’m giving this 4 stars, it deserves 3, but I’m giving it four because I got to read a book for free that I really loved.
Good reading app! I got this while at a conference, felt like reading in a few hour gap between meetings when i felt like reading. Lots of the classics are free, then there’s also a list of other free books too, probably the ones no one really WANTS to read. While i prefer a paper book this is convenient and great to have for lunch breaks at work and the like.
Absolutely wonderful. I never thought of myself as the type to go digital when it comes to books. I’ve always been a fan of hard copy…and I still am….but this service has definitely changed my perspective. Their collection is vast, books are very affordable, and good reads I was passionate about getting my hands on were instantly at my fingertips. No wait time….and no worries about where to store incoming collections as your library grows (a bit harder with hard copies).
It’s a good reader, but the poor design of this app makes it hard to buy a book. Neither the app not the mobile web site allow me to access my payment information. I had to use a PC just to change my credit card. And I shouldn’t have to re-enter all the card information when only the expiration date has changed. There ought to be a sane way to edit an exciting card. The shopping aspects of the app are a decade behind where they should be. So lame.
Was once good….now fonts are too small to be easily readable, even with font size set to max. (Running latest version of app on Samsung tab A running android 11.) Thanks for your quick response. Actually, running Android 10 (not 11…that was a typo).. Should be an easy fix though. But may be a recurring problem due to increasing screen resolutions on Android tablets.
I REALLY wish we could see progress by page or percent for the entire book, not the chapter. The ability to highlight is also insanely broken. You’ll try to highlight one paragraph and another highlights instead. If you go to your annotations page and click on something you have highlighted, it’ll take you to a different one. I take a lot of notes when I read and this is immensely frustrating.
The app is great. I like that is has ebooks as well as audiobooks. I primary use it for audiobooks. I think a great addition would be Chromecast support. I’d like the ability to cast my audiobooks over the Chromecast and listen headphone free on a set of larger speakers. Google Home support would be great as well. Hopefully these features will be added in the near future.
Works well with a few exceptions. Would be nice to have a way to search for not completed books by recent or length remaining. Also, when adding a free book to the library the “add” button does not change, so if you miss seeing the brief added bar you’re tempted to use the add button again, as the UI buttons often have dead spots inside the colored bar. Otherwise the app does just fine.
Works pretty well, better than the Windows implementation. Room for improvement in the handling of new purchases which push the in-progress volumes down into near oblivion, especially if one buys a pile of 99-cent chapters to collect a few complete novels. I enjoy romances and would really appreciate a filtering ability; I am not interested in platonic, sweet, or religous pseudo-romance novels/chapbooks, but can’t currently automatically ignore them.
Like this Amazon alternative that lets you buy ebooks while supporting independent book stores. However, the reading interface doesn’t seen to have as many options (for fonts, font size, displaying progress thru chapter and while book, etc) as I’d like. They DO have a white text on black background display option though, which is essential for me.
Pros: good selection of books in store Cons: books that i have downloaded do not load sometimes. The app unnecessarily spends time “syncing”, even though i only have 2 books & haven’t changed anything. Display issues with some books, such as words being cut off. App sometimes doesn’t save my place in the book, so I have to flip though the pages to find where I left off every time
This is an updated review. My last review outlined a problem I was having with this app where it was constantly crashing. So I uninstalled that app and then reinstalled it. I don’t know what was wrong with the app but the reinstall solved the problem. It works ok now. The only issue I have with it now is when my phone rings and the book pauses, I can’t always re-start it with my headphone play button and when I finish a book, it doesn’t loop back to the beginning on its own.
Crashing was improved and almost never happens anymore but with large books (over 600 pages) it still freezes a lot when I try to turn the page. A new highlighting bug appeared–sometimes a line will only partially highlight, after which a message appears saying “there was a problem , try again.” I highlight a lot so this is extremely annoying. Highlighting also freezes the page from turning unless I tap on the screen multiple times. Please add actual page #’s, not just chapter #’s.
I was mislead to believe that I was purchasing one audiobook, available to read in the app for free. Months later I found out from my bank statements that I was being charged $9.99 a month to use the app. To read one book, which I had forgotten about. I never received email receipts, only spam. They are clearly aware that this is a problem, based on the interaction I had with the bot on their site (one of the chat options is “I thought I was buying a book”) but purposely choose to rip people off
Slow, unresponsive, broken links, crashes constantly. An immediate, huge disappointment. Next best thing to having an ereader app that doesn’t work at all. Zero recommendation level. Developer response: Yeah, too bad, it sucks, fix it yourself. Appears to be a common answer. Plus, the recommended books are over the top with bigoted liberal political poison.
Rating 5 stars mostly to push back at Amazon. I think they need more foundational UX work (the screen times out and locks when I’m reading! It’s hard to buy multiple books at a time. Like hello?? I can’t be the only one) but wishlists have gotten easier, and I do really like the screen size/color options. Also it crashes less now, so that’s nice.
While it works, it works. A little bare bones, but whatever. Just be aware that if you use it for anything but purchases (pre-existing ebooks if you will) then at any time with no warning you could lose your entire library with no hope of getting it back. Fortunately, I still have the files, but it lost months and months of organization and reading data. :/
I use this app on an android tablet, as my Kobo ereader stopped working. The app is easy to use, and has lots of adjustable settings to improve user experience. It loses 2 stars due to the constant “Recommendations” that I am bombarded with. I am quite capable of deciding for myself what I want to read, so please stop pestering me.
I wear glasses, to read on a screen compared to regular room lighting and to be able to sit for endless hours screetched to a hault with this app. I get headaches being on facebook too long. I can easily get migraines and honestly its not comfortable teading from my phone. I feel it just better to read a real book. The navagation can get laggy…not like flipping page forward or back in a real book of course. Adjusting screen lighting doesnt help me any.
I have had 2 books on this app for several weeks but haven’t been able to read either. Most of the time the app won’t open. When it does, it crashes or times out every time I try to open a book and doesn’t respond to anything I touch. Truly dismal. Would give minus 100 stars if possible.
Generally, I love the app… however… Update 01.14.2019: still randomly duplicates my highlights and notes. Still NO option to export highlights and notes. Needs a “save highlights and notes” to cloud option. Customer service – don’t tell me to “uninstall and reinstall” – I’d lose all my highlights and notes!!! Fix the app and your service, please.
I have used this app for many years. There is a lot to like. Access to excellent books usually at reasonable prices. Purchasing a book is seamless. The ability to read samples before purchase is invaluable. However as an app it is painfully slow. It like being back on dial-up on a phone line. If this issue could be addressed it would get five stars.
After an update all underlined parts and notes disappear, the layout of books are buggy. Location of color bar when highlighting text sometimes gets in the way of the text selection, this app this a makeover as well as the manner how books with pictures are rendered. Some pages are empty and various other issues. Even when at a lower price, think twice about using this app.
Not an enjoyable experience as an e-reader and I am removing it after a single book. The book itself (purchased from Kobo) displayed scrambled. There were random parts of the next book preview scattered throughout the main book, which also had issues. The worst part, however, were the adds. They shifted the page making parts unreadable and offered no option to simply close them.
I have buy only one book in app, The Last Continent. It have disgusting navigation through the book. First, the chapters are missing from the index. You have Begin reading, About the author, and Back ads the next one. Second, the total pages count in the bottom of the page represents not the total pages count of the book but rather pages count of the current chapter. It means you can’t simple navigate between the chapters. You need to go to the first or last page of the chapter, and manually scr
I generally only use the app for purchasing ebooks and then read them on my e-reader. It’s easy to navigate and find what I’m looking for. What would be amazing is the ability to sort the books in my library by genre without having to make a collection. At least being able to quickly see fiction vs non-fiction would be an amazing improvement.