Library

The library is your bookshelf — every book you've imported, organized however you want. It supports thousands of books without slowing down.

Bookshelf views

Toggle between two views from the top-right of the library:

Grid — covers laid out in a grid. The default; best for browsing by visual recognition.
List — one row per book with title, author, progress, and status. Dense, good for large libraries.

Search the library from the header — typing filters by title, author, tags, or series. Press Esc or clear the field to see all books. To search the text inside your books instead, see Search book contents.

Search book contents

Readest can search the full text of your books from the library, not just their titles and authors. Two ways to start:

Tap the magnifier at the left of the library search field to switch it to Full Text Search. The placeholder changes to Search contents in N Book(s)…. Tap the icon again to go back to searching book details.
Or type a search as usual and tap Search in book contents above the matching books.

The search covers the books in view: your whole library from the top level, or only the books inside a group you've opened. Readest goes through them one at a time and shows which book it's on. Cancel stops the search and keeps the results found so far.

Results are grouped by book, with a match count for each. Expand a book to see excerpts under their chapter, and tap one to open the book at that spot with the match highlighted. Going back to the library brings back the same results without searching again.

The Search Options menu at the right end of the field offers the same modes as in-book search, Contains, Whole Words, Regular Expression, and Nearby Words, plus Fuzzy, which still finds a passage when your query has a typo or two. Match Case and Match Diacritics work as they do in the reader.

The first time Readest searches a book, it reads the file and saves a search index beside it, so later searches of that book are faster. A book whose file isn't on this device, such as one stored only in the cloud, is skipped unless it was indexed before; the results say how many books were unavailable. Download those books first to include them.

Bookshelves

The library page is a stack of bookshelves, each one a filtered, sorted slice of your library. Open View → Bookshelves to manage them. Readest comes with Recently read, Audiobooks, Podcasts, Default, and Finished books. These built-in shelves can be renamed, reordered, or turned off, but not deleted. The + button beside the shelf tabs adds a shelf of your own. A shelf with no matching books stays hidden on the library page.

Each shelf has its own settings:

Enabled, Carousel layout (a single horizontal row of covers; with it off, the shelf follows the View menu's Grid or List), Hide covers, Book covers (Crop or Fit), and Skeuomorphic covers.
Grouping and Sorting follow the View menu until you turn off Use global grouping or Use global sorting and pick the shelf's own.
Filters decide which books the shelf shows. Add conditions on fields such as author, tags, series, reading status, pages, date read, availability, download status, or a calibre custom column, match All conditions (AND) or Any condition (OR), and nest filter groups for more complex rules. Date fields also take Within the last a number of days, months, or years.
Exclusive makes the shelf claim the books it matches, so they don't also show up on other shelves. Turn on Include books from exclusive shelves for a shelf that should list them anyway.

Changes save as you make them, and a preview beside the settings shows the result. Searching the library ignores shelf filters and looks through every book.

Recently read is a quick-resume strip of the books you're part-way through, most recently read first. It lists books, never group or series tiles, and includes books that exclusive shelves have claimed.

For privacy on a shared screen, turn on Hide covers for your shelves. Readest replaces real cover art with plain placeholders. Covers outside the shelves, such as in book details, follow the Default shelf's setting.

Home-screen widgets

On iOS and Android, add a Readest widget to your home screen to jump straight back into your reading. Add it the usual way — long-press the home screen and pick Readest from the widget gallery. Tap a book in the widget to open it right where you left off, and the widget keeps itself up to date as you read.

iOS has one widget, in small, medium, and large sizes, showing your most recently read books with their covers and progress.
Android has two. Bookshelf shows a grid of covers from one of your bookshelves (Recently read by default). Its settings pick the shelf, the number of Rows and Columns, and whether to show Book Title and a header. Currently Reading is one wide card for the book you're reading now. Its settings choose the Font Size and which details to show: Reading Progress, Remaining Time, Remaining Pages, and Page Number, which uses the book's own page list when Reference Pages is on and the book has one. Both widgets ask for their settings when you place them, and you can reopen the settings later from the launcher's widget options.

When a book is playing through text-to-speech, the widget doubles as a mini player with play, pause, and skip controls. On Android, turn off Text to Speech in a widget's settings to hide that bar.

Organize books

Group books by:

Authors — auto-grouped by author
Books (flat view)
Groups — user-created collections (drag books into a group or create one from the selection menu). Groups can nest. See Nested groups.
Series — auto-grouped when books share series metadata. Inside a series group, grid covers carry a small #N badge with the book's place in the series.
Tags, Subjects, or Status — auto-grouped by those fields

Sort by title, author, format, page count, series, date read, date added, date published, progress, or time remaining, ascending or descending. Numbers in titles sort naturally, so Volume 2 comes before Volume 10. A secondary Then by key breaks ties and orders books inside a group — set one yourself, or leave it on the smart default that adapts to your grouping (group by author, for example, and each author's books sort by series).

Bulk operations. Enter selection mode (long-press on mobile, long-click on desktop) to pick multiple books. The action bar lets you change status, delete, group, or show details. With a single book selected, Send hands its file to the system share sheet (Mail, Messages, AirDrop, and so on) — available on iOS, Android, and macOS. Send to Nearby Device transfers it directly over your local network when Nearby BookDrop is enabled. These are different from Share Book, which uploads the book and creates a public link.

Nested groups

Groups can contain other groups, like folders inside folders. A / in a group's name sets the hierarchy: name a group Fiction/Fantasy and you get a Fantasy group inside Fiction, and Fiction/Fantasy/Epic goes one level deeper. If the parent groups don't exist yet, Readest creates them.

To put books in a subgroup:

In selection mode, pick the books and tap Group in the action bar.
In the Group Books dialog, open a group to step inside it, then choose Create New Group. The new group goes inside the group you're in. From the top level, you can also type the full path, such as Fiction/Fantasy.
Select the group and tap Confirm.

On the bookshelf, open a group to see its books and subgroups. The breadcrumb trail at the top takes you back up a level or more, and on Android so does the back button. When you rename a parent group, its subgroups move with it.

Book metadata

Tap Details in the action bar in selection mode (or right-click → Book info) to open the metadata panel:

Title, author, series — editable. Your edits take precedence over what's in the EPUB.
Cover — extracted automatically; you can replace it with any image. Tap or click the cover in book details (or the reader sidebar) to inspect it full-screen.
Tags — your labels for filtering.
File details — format, size, import date.
Pages — counted when the book is imported (for a few formats, when it's first opened), using the same count as the reader's footer, so unopened books can be sorted and filtered by length. For books imported before this was added, Main Menu → Advanced Settings → Refresh Metadata fills it in.

You can also edit a book while reading it: tap the info (More Info) button next to the title at the top of the reader sidebar, then use the Edit Metadata button in Book Details, which covers tags too.

Edited metadata is stored in Readest's book config, not in the file itself — the original EPUB is never modified.

Import options

See Getting Started → Open your first book for the basics. A few extra notes for heavy importing:

Duplicate detection — Readest hashes book content and metadata, and refuses to import the same book twice.
Batch import — drop many files at once.
From Web Browser — in an installed Readest app, open + (Import Books) → From Web Browser, save a Calibre-Web, Kavita, or other HTTP(S) book-server address, and browse it inside Readest. A book downloaded in that browser is imported automatically. This is useful for servers whose normal website offers more controls than their OPDS feed.
From Web Novel — in an installed app, open + (Import Books) → From Web Novel and paste the novel's chapter-list URL. Review the detected title and chapters, select only the chapters you want, and download them as one EPUB. Readest asks you to confirm the detected list before it starts making chapter requests.
Import from a folder — open the library's + (Import Books) menu and choose From Directory. The Import Books dialog lets you pick a folder, then filter what comes in: which File Formats to include (EPUB and PDF by default), a minimum File size to skip tiny stub files (20 KB by default), and the Folder Structure — Create groups from subfolders (each top-level subfolder becomes a library group) or Import all into library (flatten everything). Available in the desktop app and on mobile builds that can read external folders.
Read books in place — in that same dialog, turn on Read books in place to register the folder as an external library and read each book from its original location instead of copying it into Readest. It saves disk space, and cloud auto-upload still works. Note that deleting an in-place book from Readest also removes the original file; on iOS, folder access is remembered across launches.
Import failures — when a batch import hits more than one failure, Readest shows a summary dialog listing each file that couldn't be added (and why) instead of a fleeting toast.
calibre series — series name and index are pulled from EPUB, PDF, and CBZ files when available, and feed the Series grouping on the bookshelf.
Download progress — cloud and catalog downloads show their progress directly over the book cover, so you can keep browsing while a large file arrives.

Send to Readest

Send to Readest gets books, documents, and web articles into your library from outside the reader, much like Send to Kindle. Unlike Send to Kindle, a book you send stays in its own format: EPUB, PDF, MOBI, AZW3, FB2, and CBZ files are imported as they are. Only documents Readest can't open directly (DOCX, RTF, HTML, and TXT) are turned into EPUB first. Everything you send is uploaded to your account and syncs to every signed-in device, even if you've turned off Books sync on the device that received it.

There are four ways in. Sign in first so the books can sync; only email needs a paid plan.

Channel	Where	Sends	Plan
Send page	`web.readest.com/send`	Book and document files	Free
Share sheet	iOS and Android	Books, documents, and web pages	Free
Browser extension	Chrome, Edge, Brave, and Arc	The web page you're viewing	Free
Email	Your private `@readest.com` address	One attachment, or a link	Plus, Pro, Full Customization

The Send page

Open web.readest.com/send and drop files onto the page, or tap to choose them. You can send several at once, and each one shows its own progress until it reads Added to your library. The page takes EPUB, PDF, MOBI, AZW3, FB2, CBZ, TXT, DOCX, RTF, and HTML.

To save a web article from inside the desktop or mobile app, open + (Import Books) → From Web Browser, go to the page, sign in if the site asks, and tap Clip Page. Readest saves the article with its images as a self-contained EPUB. On the web, use the browser extension instead.

Share sheet

On iPhone, iPad, and Android, use Share → Readest from any app. A shared book file is imported and uploaded straight away. A shared web page is clipped into an EPUB. On iOS, sharing from Safari sends the page exactly as you see it, including articles you can only read while signed in, and the share sheet lets you choose a library group for it.

If a page shared from another app turns out to be behind a login, Readest offers to open it so you can sign in, then capture it. That sign-in is remembered, so later clips from the same site go through on their own.

Browser extension

The Send to Readest extension for Chromium browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave, and Arc) adds a toolbar button that saves the page you're viewing to your library. It builds the EPUB inside your browser, using your existing session, so paywalled and members-only articles come through with their images. Lazy-loaded images are included, and the finished book opens offline.

The extension signs in through your Readest account on web.readest.com. Visit it once while signed in, and the extension picks up your session. It never asks for or stores your password. See the extension privacy policy for exactly what it reads and sends.

The extension can also clip pages saved on your computer, such as a page saved with Save Page As or an exported HTML report. Turn on Allow access to file URLs for the extension under chrome://extensions first; the popup has a button that takes you there. Images saved next to the page come along, and the page's file path is never uploaded.

Email

On Plus or Pro, or with the one-time Full Customization unlock, you get a private address like yourname-x7k2p@readest.com. Find it under Settings → Integrations → Send to Readest.

Send a book. Attach an EPUB, PDF, MOBI, AZW, AZW3, FB2, CBZ, ZIP, TXT, DOCX, RTF, or HTML file and email it to your address. Readest takes the first supported attachment in each message, so send one book per email. The whole message can be up to 25 MB; for anything bigger, use the Send page.
Send an article. Email a message with no attachment and a link in the body, and Readest saves that page to your library. Your browser's or mail app's Share by email works for this. Readest fetches the link without your logins, so use the extension or share sheet for paywalled pages.
Tag it on the way in. Put a hashtag in the subject, like #scifi or #to-read, and the book arrives with that tag.

Only Approved senders can send to your address. Your account email is approved for you, and you can add others, such as a work address. Mail from anyone else is bounced, and the sender shows up in the list as Pending approval. Approve them with one tap and ask them to send it again. To change your address, edit the name in front of it (up to 12 lowercase letters and digits) and save. Readest issues a new address and the old one stops working, so saving again is also how you replace an address that has leaked.

Nearby BookDrop

Nearby BookDrop moves books straight between devices on the same network, with no account and no cloud round-trip. It speaks the LocalSend protocol, so the far end can be another copy of Readest, the LocalSend app itself, or KOReader running the Readest plugin. It's part of the desktop and mobile apps; the web app doesn't have it.

Turn it on at Settings → Integrations → Content Sources → Nearby BookDrop → Enable Nearby BookDrop. The device is discoverable for as long as Readest is open, under the Device Name you pick, and the panel shows the name and port it's announcing. Transfer Sounds plays a chime when a transfer starts, finishes, or fails.

To send, long-press a book and choose Send to Nearby Device, or enter select mode and tap Nearby to send several at once. Readest lists the devices it can see; pick one and the transfer starts.

To receive, leave Readest open on the receiving device. Each incoming transfer asks first, naming the sender and how many books are coming, and accepted books go into your library. Only book files are accepted — anything else is declined automatically, and the sender is told which files were skipped. On KOReader, open Tools → Readest → Receive via Nearby BookDrop instead. Your operating system may ask for local-network permission the first time.

calibre plugin

If your books live in calibre, the Readest plugin pushes the ones you pick, with their metadata, into your Readest cloud library, where they sync to every signed-in device. It is a manual push. Nothing uploads in the background.

Install it

Download Readest-<version>.calibre-plugin.zip from the latest Readest release.
In calibre, open Preferences → Plugins → Load plugin from file and choose that zip.
Restart calibre, then add the Readest button to the main toolbar if it isn't showing.

The plugin follows calibre's interface language (Preferences → Interface → Look & feel → Language). It's translated into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Chinese, and other languages show English.

Push books

From the Readest toolbar menu, choose Log in to Readest…. Email and password work, and so do the Google, Apple, GitHub, and Discord browser sign-ins.
Select any number of books in calibre.
Click Readest, or pick Push selected books to Readest from its menu.

Each book goes up in the best format Readest supports, preferring EPUB, then PDF, AZW3, MOBI, AZW, FB2, FBZ, CBZ, TXT, and MD. Title, authors, series, tags, description, publisher, language, and identifiers travel with it, plus your calibre custom columns unless you turn those off in Readest → Customize plugin…. Custom columns show up on every signed-in device, the web app included, and you can filter bookshelves by them. Metadata is embedded into a temporary copy, so the files in your calibre library are never touched.

Re-pushing updates instead of duplicating. The plugin recognizes a book by its calibre uuid and fingerprints the file, so a second push of the same book does the right thing:

Nothing changed, so the book is skipped.
Metadata edited, so the library entry is updated in place and the file is left alone.
File changed, say after a re-conversion, so the new file replaces the old entry. Reading status, grouping, progress, and the library date carry over, and notes and reading positions re-attach when the title and authors are unchanged.

Every push ends with a per-book report of what was uploaded, updated, already up to date, or failed. Readest → Check Readest status runs the same comparison without uploading anything.

OPDS catalogs

OPDS (Open Publication Distribution System) is a standard for ebook catalogs — think of it as RSS for bookstores and libraries.

To add a catalog:

Open Import Menu → Online Library in the header bar of the library page.
Add a new catalog with its root URL and optional username / password.
Browse the catalog from the library — OPDS catalogs appear as entries in the top bar.

You can also save a catalog you're already browsing: open the Options menu (or the + button) in the catalog's top bar and choose Add to My Catalogs. It bookmarks the current feed — even a deep sub-shelf — without re-entering the URL or credentials.

Many sources publish OPDS feeds:

Standard Ebooks — classics with modern typography. URL: https://standardebooks.org/opds
calibre server — if you run calibre Content Server, its OPDS endpoint works directly. If it requires a login and fails with a 400 Bad Request, set calibre's authentication mode to basic — see Troubleshooting.
Your own library server — Komga, Kavita, and other self-hosted services all expose OPDS.

Downloads from OPDS go straight into your Readest library. A title you already own shows Open & Read (with Download Again alongside) instead of a download button.

Filtering & sorting

Many catalogs expose their own filters and sort orders — by author, language, newest, popularity, and so on. On a wide screen these show up in a Filters sidebar; on a narrow screen, open the Options menu in the catalog's top bar. The available choices come from the catalog itself, so they differ from one server to the next.

Auto-download new items

Each saved catalog has an Auto-download new items toggle (cloud icon at the bottom of the catalog card, or in the add/edit dialog). When enabled, Readest checks the catalog's "new" feed in the background and pulls any new publications into your library automatically. Each card shows when it last synced and how many downloads failed, if any.

Because a feed can contain many books, Readest asks for confirmation before auto-download is enabled. Drag catalog cards by their handles to put frequently used sources first; that order follows you through catalog sync.

This is the easiest way to keep up with a Standard Ebooks or self-hosted calibre catalog without having to browse it manually.

Streaming (OPDS-PSE)

Catalogs that publish OPDS-PSE streaming links let you open a book without downloading the whole file first. Readest fetches pages from the server as you turn them, so a giant volume on a slow connection becomes readable in seconds. Streamed books live in your library as transient entries — open one again later and Readest resumes from where you left off; download it explicitly when you want a local copy.

Stored credentials

Catalog URLs save to all your signed-in devices through cloud sync. Catalog credentials (username / password) only sync if you've turned on the optional Credentials category — see Sync & Backup → What syncs for the encrypted-credentials setup.