Introducing Readest

Readest is a free, open-source ebook reader. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and the web, with one library that stays in sync everywhere.

We built Readest because reading deserves a single, capable home. For years, our own reading was split across apps: one had good typography but only worked on the desktop, another synced reliably but mangled highlights, another was perfect on e-ink and painful on a phone. Readest is our attempt to stop compromising.

The name comes from the old phrase "thou readest" (you read). It points at the reader, not the software. What matters is the hour you spend inside a book, and everything we build is meant to serve that hour and then stay out of your way.

What you can do

Start a book on your phone at breakfast, pick it up on your laptop at work, read a few pages on your e-ink reader after dinner, and finish it on your tablet in bed. Your library, your place in every book, and every highlight, bookmark, and note stay in sync across all your devices, down to the major e-ink readers like Kindle, Kobo, PocketBook, and Boox. Most reading apps tie you to one device, or one brand of hardware. Readest goes wherever you do, and you never lose your place. For us, this isn't one feature among many. It's the whole point.

Readest opens EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, FB2, CBZ, plain text, and PDF. Read in pages or in a continuous scroll, and tune the typography to your taste: font, spacing, theme, and your own CSS.

Readest is built for focused reading. Highlight, bookmark, and take notes. Search the full text of a book. Look up any word in a dictionary, Wiktionary, or Wikipedia without leaving the page. Translate a sentence, or a whole book, when much of what you read is in another language. Open two books side by side with Parallel Read. And when you would rather listen, Readest reads your book aloud in many languages, so a commute or a workout can be reading time too.

Readest is also built to be used by everyone. Every screen is reachable from the keyboard, and Readest works with screen readers including VoiceOver, TalkBack, NVDA, and Orca.

Your books stay yours

Readest is local-first. We mean three plain things by that:

• Yours. Your books and highlights live on your device, not on our servers.
• Portable. You can export your highlights and annotations, and back up your whole library.
• Open. Sync is a convenience, not a lock-in. Readest supports open options like WebDAV and self-hosting, so you are never tied to us.

Who builds Readest

I'm Huang Xin (chrox), and I started Readest with Hou Qingping (houqp). Before this, we had both spent years tinkering on KOReader, and a fair amount of what we believe about reading software was quietly shaped there. In those early days, Charz and I also talked through a lot of how Readest should look and feel.

We still write most of the core, but Readest is the work of a much wider community. A steady stream of contributors fix bugs, polish the interface, translate the app, and ship features we would not have reached alone. If you write code, have an eye for design, or speak a language we have translated poorly, you are welcome to help.

Accessibility is personal for me. My background is in visual neuroscience, and in graduate school I studied amblyopia in children. That work drew me to the people living with these conditions, and ever since I've wanted to build something that genuinely helps blind and low-vision readers. The Blind Android Users community has been a real help here. They had me on their show, and we've kept talking since: they test Readest with TalkBack and tell us where it falls short, and a lot of our accessibility work came out of those conversations.

Why we rewrote Foliate

Readest began as a rewrite of Foliate, a much-loved ebook reader made by John Factotum (johnfactotum). People often ask why we started something new instead of improving a reader that already worked. The honest answer is that we tried, but the two readers we loved most weren't built for the app we wanted to make.

We come from KOReader, and we still love it. It does something genuinely hard: it runs beautifully on e-ink readers, the kind with small screens and almost nothing to spare. That strength is also its limit. It was made for those devices, and turning it into something that feels at home on a modern phone or laptop wouldn't be a tweak. It would be a different app.

Foliate is the other reader we admire. It has real taste, and the part of it that reads your books and lays out the pages is excellent: it quietly makes sense of all the messy, inconsistent ebooks that exist out in the world. But Foliate only runs on Linux. If you want that same reader on your phone, iPad, Windows laptop, or in a browser, it can't come with you.

We kept running into the same limit from two directions. The readers we admired were each excellent in their own corner. The corner was the problem. What we wanted was easy to say and hard to build: one reader that lives on every device you read on, and feels the same on all of them.

Getting there meant starting over on a new foundation, one that could run everywhere at once. That is why it's a "rewrite" and not a quick fix: there was no shortcut from where those readers were to where we needed to be.

We kept the best part of Foliate, though. The engine that reads and displays your books, the part it got really right, was too good to leave behind. Readest still runs on our own version of that engine, which we keep fast and improve over time, so the next page is usually ready before you turn it. A year in, Readest is the same app on your phone, your computer, and the web. When we fix something, it's fixed everywhere at once, and a book looks the same no matter where you open it.

For the curious: under the hood it's built with web technology, wrapped into native apps with Tauri and tuned for speed and security with Rust. But you should never have to think about any of that.

How it is funded, and built to last

We would rather be plain about money than vague. The app is free. The optional cloud-sync service is sustained by donations and a small paid tier. We keep the price low on purpose: our goal is to still be here in ten years, not to maximize revenue now.

Being open source changes what you are trusting. With a closed reading app, you have to trust one company to stay alive and stay fair. With Readest, the source is public. If the original developers stopped, the code would remain. Others could continue it, run the service themselves, or build something compatible. Your library and your highlights don't depend on a single company. That is what local-first is really about: a tool you can walk away from is one you can trust.

Try it