Anyone try Episteme Reader (Android)?

General
1

Document and ebook reader. It’s available on Play Store, F-Droid, and Github via Obtainium. Different versions have different features with some versions more private than others.

So far, I like it. It’s striking that balance I crave of being pretty, simple, and functional, which I hadn’t yet found from FOSS and privacy oriented offerings. They have a no network version, but even the F-Droid version works fine after I cut network access on GrapheneOS.

The github says the first commit was only a few months ago in February 2026.

What are this community’s thoughts?

(I am not the developer. I only randomly discovered this on F-Droid).

5 Likes
2

The name is a bit unfortunate. Instead of “Episteme” I read “Epstein” …

6 Likes
3

yes, using it for 2 months now.
Currently reading Kraken by China Miéville on it and I don’t use it for anything else except reading epub books.

4

Also using it since a while. The features are very good (highlighting of the spoken text, skipping back and forth) but the main bottleneck are FOSS TTS models. Running it with SherpaTTS which uses Piper Models and they are just.. Okay I would say. What are you all using?

5

Kinda crazy that you see the models on SherpaTTS as “just…Okay.”

Compared to anything local and FOSS just 3 years ago, they’re amazing. It used to just basically be things like RHVoice with 90s style computer voices.

6

The project started in May 2025 and later I made a foss version that why the repo is new.

5 Likes
7

Same here lol

8

I might be biased due to the exponential improvements in AI we see in general. Depending on what type of text it reads, the pronounciations of dates, abbreviations, puncuations etc. can be literally so bad that I have to check the text to understand. I should add that I am using more than English for TTS, so lower trainig data and quality I guess.

9

Welcome to Privacy Guides. And thank you for making this lovely app!

@team can you assist @1m4ryan so that they are properly marked and verified on here as the developer of Episteme? It looks like they just created a new Privacy Guides account.

3 Likes
10

Hi!

I am the developer. Thank you for using the app.

Just wanted to say there is a fully offline version which is stripped of network access and online features hidden. Its on github release pages and not on fdroid so you probably have to use obtainium.

4 Likes
11

The world could do with a bit more episteme and a bit less doxa. The world would be a better place. Looks like a neat app.

4 Likes
12

Really nicely done app, great work. Just found it couple months ago, it’s been a real pleasure to use. Running the Fdroid version but good to know of the fully offline version also, making a note. Thanks!

1 Like