Freda is a free program for reading electronic books (ebooks) on Windows Phone. It reads EPUB (DRM-free), HTML and TXT format books. The program offers customisable controls, fonts and colours, plus annotations and bookmarks.

Freda can download books from on-line catalogs like Feedbooks, Smashwords and the Gutenberg Project. Or if you have an existing book collection, you can use DropBox or Calibre to share it with your phone. Freda can also download books from any website, using an in-application web-browser.

Up to twenty books can be downloaded and kept locally on your phone, so you can carry on reading when you don't have network connectivity.

There is a demo at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7QLe6sdoZ0 , and a manual at http://www.turnipsoft.co.uk/freda .

Quick Start:

When you first start Freda, you will see a list of classic books. To open one of them, touch the book title. You will see a screen with a '...loading...' message, and moving coloured dots at the bottom of the screen. When the book is downloaded and ready for you to start reading, the 'loading' message will disappear, and you will see the first page of the book. Normally, this will be a 'title page', containing the book title and/or the picture from the cover. You will see a page number indicator, "-/-" at the bottom of the page (the -/- symbols mean that Freda has not finished scanning through the book, and so it doesn't yet know how many pages there are). The coloured moving dots will remain on the screen as long as the scanning process continues (maybe for for several minutes), but you can begin reading right away - tap the bottom of the page to begin reading.

For more information, refer to the manual.

[NOTE: this version of freda cannot read Chinese. If you need to do this, use the 'freda-chinese' app, which can display Chinese characters. It is the same program as this one except that, because of the need to add Chinese font data, it is a much larger install.]





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