Before going to explain specific difference between FileInputStream and FileReader in Java, I would like to state fundamental difference between an InputStream and a Reader in Java, and when to use InputStream and when to go for Reader. Actually, Both InputStream and Reader are abstractions to read data from source, which can be either file or socket, but main difference between them is, InputStream is used to read binary data, while Reader is used to read text data, precisely Unicode characters. So what is difference between binary and text data? well everything you read is essentially bytes, but to convert a byte to text, you need a character encoding scheme. Reader classes uses character encoding to decode bytes and return characters to caller.