Android openness and library limits

I wrote a short note in 2017 after yet another late night battle with e-books on Android. My takeaway still stands. Android is open, your library is not. Formats, DRM, and rendering engines still decide what you can read, annotate, and keep. That’s the real stake for readers and for libraries that need access and preservation. 📚👇

Found this while digging through my notes: April 10, 2017 - “On eBooks on Android.” Back then I bounced between Kindle, Play Books, and Moon+. EPUB3 felt uneven. Most reading happened on 1080p phones. Night mode and TTS were finally usable. Yes, really. Some of that aged well. Some did not.

2017 snapshot in three layers. Formats like EPUB, MOBI, AZW, and PDF set the ceiling. DRM silos from Adobe and Amazon defined what you owned. Rendering engines, often WebView forks, controlled hyphenation, ligatures, and layout. Android shined at sideloading, OPDS catalogs, file access, and system TTS. It fell short on annotation export, cross app syncing, consistent CSS, and phone sized PDFs. Many of us lived in Calibre plus send to device. We accepted vendor lock in for sync and dictionaries.

By 2025 a lot got better. Denser OLED screens. Better hyphenation and kerning. Steadier EPUB3 parsing. Indie readers like KOReader, ReadEra, and Librera matured. Library access widened with Libby and friends, and some channels adopted lighter DRM like LCP. The core frictions stayed. Annotations are still not a first class, portable thing. PDFs still fight phones. Storefront is still not your bookshelf and not your archive. I guessed audiobooks and bundles would be niche. I was wrong. I guessed annotation portability would arrive fast. I was very wrong.

What I do now. Prefer open formats and keep an off platform archive. Split the bookstore from the bookshelf. Treat highlights as data and back them up. Avoid features that trap notes. Open questions. What minimal spec would unlock cross app highlight and annotation sync. Should Android offer a system API for dictionaries and annotations so apps can interoperate. If subscriptions win, how do we keep personal libraries durable.

Here’s the original note from 2017: https://github.com/AnandChowdhary/notes/blob/main/notes/2017/on-e-books-on.md