What Are The Best Apps Like Wattpad For Free Novel Reading?

There are a bunch of apps for reading books. I know of Webnovel for one. I really enjoy it because they have an enormous collection of original works and translated works (most are Asian fantasy/romance). There is a large active community and it’s easy to interact with the authors. Radish is another favorite for me because it allows me to read serialized fiction in a way that’s similar to binge watching a TV show. Every day a new chapter is unlocked for you. For indie works I highly recommend Royal Road. It has a vast amount of progression fantasy and LitRPG novels that you cannot find anywhere else. The comment section is also hilarious and adds to my reading experience.

For more “classic” works, you really can’t go wrong with Project Gutenberg, which has a massive library of public domain works, though it’s definitely lacking in the social department. A site I’ve discovered recently is Inkr Comics & Novels, which seems to host a large library of webcomics and light novels — mostly written by Korean and Japanese authors. The site I use for a lot of my personal reading is Neovel, which has a pretty clean interface for a novel-reader, and the personalized recommendations on the site have led me to some really great stories.

Prioritizing apps that offer offline reading and minimal ads, NovelReader is currently my favorite app for reading novels, as it allows access to multiple platforms and has great customization options for viewing, including many fonts and themes to read at night. Moon+ Reader also allows reading of EPUBs uploaded to cloud storage, containing free novels found on the web, especially fan-translated novels not available on mainstream reading platforms.

For specific genres, like I’m reading mostly fiction right now, there’s ‘Tapas’ that has pretty good chapters that are really short, so you can just read it for a few minutes here and then come back to it. And also the ‘ink’ system that they have, I really enjoy because you have to unlock every chapter progressively, as opposed to just buying all of the chapters upfront, so it’s kind of a premium-feeling app.

Webtoon creators have also founded Yonder, a new app for serialized novels. Yonder offers daily free passes to read novels and a clean, beautiful UI that is light years ahead of Wattpad’s cluttered design. Find and talk about even more apps in noveltranslations on reddit. We found dozens of good ones through the enthusiastic rants of novel fans there.

My absolute favorite books apps are ones that are reminiscent of wandering around a used bookstore and finding hidden gems within its dusty walls. The free Dreame app has a ton of Dark Romance and Paranormal books for your reading pleasure during those grey rainy days, and this app is actually capable of learning your preferences to feed your bad for you morally ambiguous/vampire obsessed self. The free GoodNovel app is also a hybrid of providing readers with FREE chapters to get hooked to and users can OPTIONAL purchase the rest of the chapters for that novel written by other users (surprisingly good writing for it’s a user-generated content!).

One platform I use to find global fiction is 'Wuxiaworld' for Chinese cultivation novels (translated well and a ton of comments with OP protagonists being meme’d left and right). As for very short works of fiction, the burgeoning fiction section on 'Medium' (yes, that site) is written by people who publish in the format of a serial and are often very literary.

Another app that I find entertaining is Serial Box, now rebranded as Realm. It offers episodes of novels, read to you as though they were podcasts. There are some great sci-fi collaborations between Realm and well-known authors (Cassandra Clare, for example). Oh, and yes, as with Radish above, many of these apps will reward daily logins with free coins. I have stockpiled enough of them to read an entire series for free, should I so choose.