New: sometimes you just want to read it on your phone

The Kobo is the good screen. Great e-ink, no glare, nothing trying to pull you back to the time-suck apps. When I sit down to actually read, that’s what I reach for. But the Kobo is also, sometimes, not nearby. On the nightstand, in a bag, downstairs charging. And the moment I want to read is usually right now: ten minutes in a line, the couch after dinner, the subway. The book I want is a file I already own, and the device it’s on is the phone in my hand.

So Shelf Life now lets you read epubs directly. That part is brand new, just released: the app already tracked your books and pushed them to a Kobo, and now there’s a reader to go with it. You attach an epub to a book in your library, one you imported or one you downloaded, and there’s a Read button sitting right next to it. Tap it and the book opens full-screen.

Turning pages is about what you’d guess. Tap the right edge to go forward, the left to go back, or swipe if that’s your habit. Tap the middle and the controls slide away, so it’s just text and a small page count in the corner. Tap again and they come back: a bar across the top to close the book, jump to the contents, drop a bookmark, or open settings, and a scrubber along the bottom that shows where you are in the whole thing.

Settings is thin on purpose. There’s one knob that matters, text size, and it goes from small to quite large. That’s mostly it. No fonts to audition, no line-height slider, no eight themes to preview. I went back and forth on whether that was too little and landed on liking it. I set the size once and stopped thinking about the reader, which is what a reader is for.

The contents list comes from the book itself, so you can skip between chapters. Bookmarks are yours: tap the ribbon on a page you want to find again and they collect in a list right next to the contents, in reading order. And it remembers where you were. Leave mid-chapter, come back tomorrow, and it opens on that page.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect to care about. If you also read the same book on your Kobo, you can pull your reading position back from it over a USB cable, and then the furthest-along spot wins, whether that was the phone in line or the e-reader in bed. Where you left off follows you around, instead of stranding you a chapter behind on whichever screen you happened to pick up second. It’s one cable and a few taps, not a background cloud sync, so you do have to do it on purpose. But it means the phone and the Kobo stop being two separate copies of the same book.

The reader in Shelf Life isn’t out to beat the Kobo. It’s a simple solution to the problem of fitting in a quick read when you just have your phone on you.