Whether the reading matter is educational, entertaining, factual or fictional, reading for pleasure is a portal to a universe of both information and pure imagination.
However, as it’s impossible to carry an entire physical library-worth of books around with you, the choice eager eye-users are left with is a small selection of totable tomes or an e-reader, like the Kindle Colorsoft.
Or there’s always the option to review your reading material on your smartphone, but then, with relatively small, gleamingly reflective displays and small fonts, they’re really not designed to allow you to do that in comfort, are they? Well, most aren’t.
But, predictably for such a loaded question, some smartphones have been created with readability not as an afterthought but as a specific selling point.
Best smartphones for reading books at a glance
Naturally, then, with the writing seemingly on the wall for paper-based books in the wild, I’ve been thumbing through the virtual pages of five excellent options that are ideal for running your eyes over.
If you’re after a device that can do it all, see my selection of the best phones to read books on below.
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Bigme ePaper Smartphone Hibreak Pro
Best: overall
Putting ePaper first and eschewing all thought of the nonsense that is colour, the Bigme ePaper Smartphone Hibreak Pro is a black and white only option that presents eager eyes with a 6.13-inch ePaper display of 824 x 1648-pixels and a marvellous 300 PPI that keeps everything on the e-page before you sharper even than Oscar Wilde’s wit.
With an octo-core MediaTek Dimensity 1080 chip at its heart, featuring two Arm Cortex‑A78 processors clocked up to 2.6GHz, performance is excellent, with rapid response when firing up apps.
Featuring 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, there’s ample space for a whole British Library of books, while Android 14 handles your digital Dewey Decimal system alongside all other apps with the robot reliability.
Smooth in operation, with 21fps refresh, auto ghosting removal, to make things even more comfortable for fans of words laid out in a syntactic unit, you can customise fonts, spacing and margins to suit, also switching between light and dark modes. Then comes Bigme’s xReader, a tool which lets the reader annotate, highlight and translate text as they go.
Yes, there are also cameras, namely 20MP rear and 5MP front, with photo text recognition, alongside NFC for payments, fingerprint unlocking, GPS, Bluetooth 5.2, Bigme GPT 4.0 AI, and voice to text, which is quite the impressive list of tech spec for a phone costing under £250, but for those who – returning to remit – want the perfect, pocketable device for the pleasurable perusal of novels, non-fiction and newspapers and/or for easy editing, the Bigme ePaper Smartphone Hibreak Pro has every trick in the, ahem, book.
Specs
Buy now £245.00, Bigme
TCL 60 SE NXTPAPER 5G
Best for: Page-turning perfection
Where better to start in a review round-up of smartphones that rock for reading than with a model that is so invested in allowing its owners eye-easy access to the written word that it even has the word ‘paper’ in its name? Precisely, so say hello to the 60 SE NXTPAPER 5G from TCL.
Powered by an octo-core MediaTek Dimensity 6300 and running on Android 15, TCL may not be a familiar name, but the Chinese brand has been around since 1981, making display panels, TVs, and mobile phones and sells in over 160 countries, so there’s more than a little heritage in the 60 SE.
Featuring 8GB RAM (expandable via SD to 18GB) and 256GB of storage (roughly 85K books), sure there is a 50MP main camera and an 8MP snapper on the front, but we’re not here to talk photo turkey, we’re here to bang on about bookworming. So, what are we looking at? Well, for a start a sweet-sized 6.7-inch display that allows plenty of page room, and which also boasts an HD+ resolution of some 720 x 1600-pixels, and a 120Hz refresh rate, so fonts are always pin-sharp, with Max Ink Mode making blacks solidly sable against the crisp white of the background, while the inclusion of anti-glare technology and low blue light emission means extended screen time without eye fatigue.
Or for those who favour a splash of colour in their reading material of choice, there’s even a Colour Paper Mode for the likes of magazines and graphic novels.
And finally, absolutely cementing its position as one of the finest phones for boundless bibliomaniacs, for those who love to truly lose themselves in literature, you can even instantly mute notifications to ensure your reading time goes utterly interruption-free.
The TCL 60 SE NXTPAPER 5G: chapter and verse on how to render a phone for reading.
Specs
Buy now £179.00, AO
OnePlus Open
Best for: Seeing the whole paragraphy picture
There’s a wealth of folding phones available on the UK market these days, some costing an absolute King’s ransom from players well-known and others considerably undercutting prices for folders from names not quite so renowned. There’s also the distinction to be made between folding phones and flip phones, so whilst I’ve seen both types being dropped quite often, only the former actually opens up like a book…
Okay, you saw where that was going and, I freely admit, I initially looked into the OnePlus Open based on the folding design and ‘relatively’ low price for a folding phone in 2025; but then I also started to check out its spec and quickly saw that it offered much more to readers than just a big, pretty face.
However, we’re going to start with that big, pretty face, because that’s just the way the world works I’m afraid. And there it is, 6.3-inches in size when closed and a mighty 7.8 inches when unfolded like the wings of a particularly vibrant butterfly. An AMOLED screen with a stunning 2K (2440 x 2268-pixel) resolution and a smooth as velvet-butter 120Hz refresh rate, the display is impeccably sharp and easy on the eye thanks to ‘Eye Comfort’ which reduces blue light to alleviate ocular strain and ‘Nature tone’ which creates much more, as you may have guessed, natural image colours.
In other, non-reading related areas, the OnePlus Open features a 48MP main camera, complete with 64MP telephoto camera and 48MP ultrawide camera, plus a 32MP shooter round the front, runs on the Android 13-based OxygenOS 13.2, is powered by a mighty Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 to deliver superior performance, and comes with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. So, specced to the metaphorical smartphone rafters with top tech in all expected areas, alongside being the finest of the affordable folding phones.
Okay, so £1200 is still one hell of a wedge to throw at a smartphone just for reading, especially when £240 will get you the new Kindle Colorsoft, but factoring in all the other advanced elements I’ve outlined above, for those who like to read and read well while on the go, the OnePlus Open could well be the booklover’s best friend.
Specs
Buy now £1200.00, OnePlus
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7
Best for: Big spenders
City dweller, successful fella, thought to himself "Oops, I've got a lot of money – is, of course, the opening lyrics to Blur’s 1995 hit ‘Country House’ , and by tenuous connection, if you happen to be a city dweller here in the heart of the nation’s gleaming capital AND you’ve got a lot of money, you too could be the proud owner of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7.
Yep, retailing at the nose-bleed end of £1800, this is another folding phone that unfurls its AMOLED wings to present a vast 8-inch array on which you can read all your favourite wordy matter, in complete eye comfort, to your heart’s content.
But, of course, it’s not just ‘another’ folding phone, for this is a Samsung folding phone, the latest, in fact, from Sammy’s stable and because of that it comes imbued with the toppest of the top tech.
This includes the faster-than-a-speeding bullet Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy, the standard Snapdragon 8 Elite being clocked at peak CPU speeds of 4.6GHz and the ‘for Galaxy’ even faster. This makes for utterly seamless use, and the 120Hz refresh rate of the beautiful FHD+ (2520 x 1080-pixels) screen an instantly responsive dream to use.
Camera-wise, there’s an epic 200MP main snapper with a 12MP ultrawide and 10MP telephoto, and a 10MP front facer, while RAM and storage come in at 12GB and 256GB respectively.
But it’s the readability element that we’re here to focus on, and that 8-inch2 display is perfect as an e-reader, Kindle novels and comics all appearing in the perfect two-page spread format, and as the Kindle app is optimised for the Z Fold 7 you can switch to column view and adjust font size to suit.
As comfortable in the hand as its content is on the eyes, yes, it’s costly (and the RAM/storage upgrade options will take you to £1900 and, ultimately, £2200), but what price e-reader folding phone perfection? I just told you…
Specs
Buy now £1800.00, Samsung
Google Pixel Pro 9 Fold
Best for: An AI eyeful
Another folding option from the realms of the rich, the Google Pixel Pro 9 Fold offers an eye-pleasing 8-inches when opened, and that’s 8-inches of Super Actua Flex OLED with 2076 x 2152-pixels at 373 PPI and with a refresh rate of up to 120Hz, making the whole ocular experience smooth and comfortably uncramped.
Powered by Google’s own octo-core Tensor G4 processor, the Pixel Pro 9 Fold is quicker on app access than previous models, even though the G4 chip has been more with enhanced AI in mind than speed, per se. This, of course, means that Gemini is always on-hand for a chat and to offer AI assistance both online and on-device in case you end up somewhere hellish where there’s no modern world connection, like Afghanistan or Clacton.
And that omnipresent AI will also ensure that the snaps you take with the rear array of 48MP main, 10.5MP ultrawide, 10.8MP telephoto cameras, plus 10MP front, will always be at their sharpest and smartest.
But, once again, we’re not here to bang on about cameras and artificial cleverness, no, this is about the reading experience, and with that aforementioned pixel count, refresh rate and 1600 nits (2700 nits peak) brightness, the Pro 9 Fold is glorious to behold, with pin-sharp images, dark blacks and strong contrasts, making it more than ideal for reading two-page spread format books and comics. Okay, the fold down the centre is unavoidably obvious, but only in so much as the gutter of an actual book would be, so all good.
Naturally, the Google Pixel Pro 9 Fold also comes with the Google Books app preinstalled, so there’s unlimited access to all the books in the world, from the classics of Dickens to the dirge of Dan Brown, and everything before, after and in between, the 8-inch2 display working akin to the most efficient e-readers.
With 16GB RAM and 256GB storage (upgradeable to 512GB), the weight of 257g might lead to a bit of single hand hold fatigue as you make your way through equally weighty tomes, but otherwise the Pro 9 Fold is comfortable to carry.
Expensive? You betcha. With an entry price of £1750 for the 256GB version, the Google is 50 quid cheaper than the Samsung, but with quite the difference in specs between them when it comes to cameras and other finer functions, if this level of expense is where you exist (and well done, you) then choosing between the two will simply come down to which one better suits your very exacting demands.
Specs
Buy now £1750.00, Google
Verdict
Five phones, all quite different, but with one thing in common: they excel as e-readers. With wildly differing price points, too, which option is right for you really depends on one essential factor: you. Other than reading, what else do you need it to do?
Also, the all-important, how much expendable income are you willing to part with? But sticking to the raison d’être of this entire round-up, when it comes to taking pure e-reader abilities, and nothing else, into account, for me it has to be a toss-up between the TCL and the Bigme, the Bigme’s editing capabilities probably just edging it.
