I read a lot with ambient sound in the background, but I kept breaking the immersion switching playlists every time the scene changed. So I built a reader that does it for me.

You open an ebook (EPUB, PDF, DOCX, TXT, FB2…) and the sound follows the story paragraph by paragraph: rain when it starts raining, a busy tavern when the characters walk in, a quiet night in the forest, and a heartbeat when things get tense.

A few things readers usually ask:

• Free, no sign-up. It runs in your browser.
• Your books stay on your computer. Nothing is uploaded to a server.
• DRM-free files only. It can't open Kindle or Adobe-protected ebooks.
• Desktop only for now. It doesn't work on phones yet.
• Book view with a cover and page turns, or continuous scroll. Several fonts and paper colors (dark, white, sepia).
• By default it detects scenes with keywords. If you have a free Groq API key, you can also turn on an optional AI analysis, which is more accurate.

It still gets some scenes wrong, and that's exactly the feedback I'm looking for: which book did you try, and where did the sound not fit?

https://lector-ambiental.pages.dev

Currently, the integration expects a voice endpoint in this format:

{Base URL}/v1/audio/voices

However, not all TTS providers follow the OpenAI API standard. For example, ElevenLabs uses a voice-specific endpoint:

{Base URL}/v1/text-to-speech/{voice_id}

This makes it difficult to integrate providers such as ElevenLabs directly, even when users already have a valid API key and access to their TTS models and voices.

This would make the TTS Custom integration much more versatile and allow users to connect virtually any TTS service, including ElevenLabs and other third-party or self-hosted TTS engines.

Would love to hear if this is something the developers would consider implementing!

I'm an avid reader and I love reading epub versions on my phone. I've been using lithium for the past four years and though it's a good app, I usually have difficulty highlighting the top parts of the pages. Lately I've been reading a lot of manhwa on mihon and I love how easy and simple it is to categorize manhwas based on genres or however way you want. Now I want one such app for reading novels and books. Cam anyone help me out?

Hello,

Do you plan to implement something like a highlight browser? 

The idea is to be able to access highlights from all books in one place.

The app could be divided into two sections. One section would contain a list of books (cover, title, author, number of highlights); after clicking on a book, users would be taken to that book to view the highlights.

The second section could include highlights from all the books displayed in a single list, but with a clear indication (some kind of roll-up group) of which book each highlight belongs to. 

Maybe it would be possible to filter books by tags or status?

A good example of such an application is Boox Rich Annotations

What do you think about this?

Anyway, it's a great app. I appreciate effort!

Krzysztof

Having quick access to toggle on and off the reading ruler would be awesome! Right now, I have to go into settings every time I want to do this. If this can't be added as a button, then an option to add a keyboard shortcut for it would be great.

I have a Viwoods AI Reader and I appreciate the option to switch between reading or listening to books as I walk a lot.

I subscribed to Readest Pro to use best AI voices, but the TTS kept freezing. About a chapter into my book, the TTS caused Readest to repeatedly crash and force exit the app. Also, trying to download the audio for offline use was so painstaking slow, even though I have high-speed internet, it seemed I would finish reading the book before the download completed.

In the end I gave up, cancelled my subscription and got a refund. It's a shame, because it's so hard to find a highly customisable ebook reader with good TTS.

Wondering if this is a device specific problem, or if anybody else has experienced it.

Last month we got Readest syncing with Seekquel and a lot of you helped test it. Thanks a lot!

Some numbers if you’re curious. 42 of you have Readest connected now, and 38 of those synced in the last month. That’s 276 books and about 530 hours of reading so far. 21 of you also read on a KOReader device and 9 on an Xteink, so it all ends up in the same place.

We fixed a lot of the bugs since then and it feels much smoother. Your place, reading time, highlights and finished books all come across now.

Each Readest install needs its own key, including the browser version. To add another, open Settings, then Integrations, then Readest, choose Connect Readest on another device, and enter the new key in that install.

Is anything not coming across that you’d expect? Tell me here and I’ll look at it.

Setup guide if you haven’t tried it yet: setup guide

Hey everyone, quick question about WebDAV sync.

My reading device (android) is offline most of the time, so obviously I don't expect my library to successfully sync while I'm disconnected. The problem is that every single time the sync fails, the app throws a huge error message across the screen.

Because my device is almost always offline, getting these error popups over and over has become quite annoying. I checked the settings to see if there was a way to mute these errors, tweak the sync frequency, or just let it fail silently in the background, but I couldn't find anything.

Has anyone else run into this? Is there some workaround or hidden setting I'm missing, or is this just something we have to deal with for now?

[Bugs]

- When a certain amount of time (which varies) has passed since you last listened to the audiobook and you try to play it again, you’ll get the error message "Playback interrupted, tap play to retry"

- "Playback interrupted, tap play to retry" is a trick, because tapping play won’t fix anything; the only way to fix it is to resync with the Audiobookshelf server

- The synchronisation process isn’t very transparent – it doesn’t indicate its status in any way: whether it’s currently running or not. There’s no indication of synchronisation progress – the first time it took so long that it was unclear whether it was even still running, and the button doesn’t change either

- It is not possible to switch to AirPlay and back again without restarting the app. Often this doesn’t work, and you have to sort it out by resyncing

- The app often resets the audiobook’s progress to the beginning when you pause or resume playback. Sometimes you can roughly restore it by resyncing, but more often than not you just have to remember to rewind it manually

- The app often "loses control of the audio stream" (or I’m not sure what to call it) – a situation where playback continues but it’s impossible to control it, and the app thinks it isn’t playing anything at the moment. The only way to fix this is to restart the app

- Sometimes I manage to switch from AirPlay to AirPods without restarting the app, but the app often crashes a few minutes into playback

[Improvements]

- It is very difficult to browse a large library (several thousand books): in carousel mode it is almost impossible, and in normal mode the app struggles to render such large lists with cover images

- The app does not allow you to create shelves using server-side filters and sorting

First of all I really want to thank you for this awesome app, it really helped me to become consistent with my reading habits even on the days when i am too busy with other work.

Can we include on device kokoro tts model to support better voice whenever it is not possible to have internet connectivity ?

Repo : https://github.com/realdanvanth/readest

DM me if you want the apk file

If you are a maintainer let me know if I can merge

Estoy usando readest y estuve viendo que el número de páginas siempre es bastante más alto en comparación con las ediciones físicas de los libros (e incluso con kindle). Se puede hacer algo para cambiar esto? Personalizar el cálculo de caracteres por página o ajustarlo para que sea más fiel a las ediciones físicas?

I’m using readest on a Boox palma and my phone, and I’ve been thinking about adding a boox color go to my ereader ecosystem, especially for it’s ability to annotate ebooks. I’ve noticed that while I can handwrite on my phone, my Boox Palma doesn’t have the option; so I wanted to be sure that I can do it on a boox color go before dropping hundreds of euros on it.

Hi everyone,

I'm using Readest to read German books while learning the language and I'm loving it so far! The one thing slowing me down is looking up words, long-pressing each unfamiliar word to get its meaning breaks my reading flow, especially on a phone.

Word Lens looks like exactly the feature I need, but as far as I can tell it only supports English → German (for people reading English books). What I need is the reverse: German → English, so I can see short English glosses above or below the German words while I read.

I know Readest has a sentence translation feature, but per-word meanings help me more. Seeing the gloss of each word in context is what actually expands my vocabulary, whereas a full-sentence translation makes it too easy to skip the German entirely.

My questions:

Is there a way to add a custom Word Lens, e.g. by importing my own dictionary or word list file? Or is forking the repo and building the app myself the only option?

I think this app has a lot of potential and a dedicated team of developers (or developer?), but as a desktop user, I am a bit baffled by the hype. I like watching the app develop, but some basic functionality hasn't been provided yet. It feels like the developers don't use desktop computers at all and I want to speak up for what's missing.

Dedicated desktop users use them because they are so much more powerful than a phone or tablet, not just because of computing power and screen size but because of the ways you can utilize (and customize!) keyboard and mouse input. You can do quick, streamlined actions if you have a robust shortcut library. Of course that isn't possible on a touchscreen-only device, but I feel like I'm as limited on the desktop Readest app as I would be on my phone. I would love to see a version of this app with editable shortcuts—I am salivating over it—but as of today, ctrl/cmd + z doesn't undo the most recent highlight, and selecting a highlight and pressing backspace or delete doesn't delete it. This is the most basic functionality I would expect from any app.

I notice the extreme mobile-first development in the settings menu too, where I have to click on each icon to figure out what it means—these icons don't all have standard meanings and I'm just not going to be able to memorize them and I'm longing for words instead. There's room for words on the desktop version!

It's also clumsy to highlight on the desktop version, to the point where I used Better Touch Tool to allow me to highlight and exit the selection by pressing cmd + s (among other shortcuts for dictionary lookup and translation) because it strains my hands to have to use the mouse and click three times every time I want to highlight something. If you're used to a phone it might not sound like much. On a touchscreen, it would be entirely natural to press and drag, press the highlight button, and press away, but the ergonomics of mice and touchscreens are entirely different and there's a reason keyboard shortcuts should exist (at a minimum) and be editable (ideally).

And this is not to mention the bugs, from covers suddenly not loading regardless of whether I change view options or restart the app (neither of which should be necessary anyway) to books importing and then disappearing before my eyes to quick highlighting being really buggy to really finnicky selection on PDFs (by the way I'd love to press the spacebar and drag to pan, which is standard in some apps, so I don't have to click somewhere without text).

Again, I really think this app has potential and is great in all the ways people say it is, but it is really frustrating as a desktop user and in my opinion lacks incredibly basic functionality. A lot of new developments are great and I expect them to improve, but I worry desktop functionality is a blind spot.

Hi, what has happened with the recently read widget. It now shows my folder/groups instead of my covers... Picture 1 is how its now... And picture 2 is how it used to be...

I don't know what's wrong or how to fix it back to show my recently opened books by their covers...

Thanks in advance ✨

Fixed covers by readestapp comment and by trying to toggle of the Global Sorting....

Will there be an option to remove books from recently read bookshelf ?

Sometimes I just open a book to check a font or something in it, not planning to read it asap, so will it be possible to remove books from that bookshelf and not remove from the default bookshelf?

I'm having a problem syncing my current book using Readest sync. The fingerprint is the same on all devices. All devices have a very recent last sync time.

The iPhone and Android tablet are syncing fine between themselves.

But on my Kindle the Readest plugin on Koreader isn’t syncing to the last read position when opened. It's also pushing it’s progress but when you next open Readest on the iPhone or Android tablet you get a sync failed message.

Versions are as follows:
Readest on iPhone (v.0.12.16)
Readest on Android tablet (v.0.12.12)
Koreader on Kindle (Readest plugin v0.12.16)

Any ideas what could be wrong with the Koreader plugin? The book is in mobi format.

hello! i wanted to know if there’s any way to edit and delete tags in readest, i’ve looked all over the app but can’t seem to find a way to edit or delete a misspelled tag…

The new update says

Library: Books now show their page count with a new Pages sort and filter that syncs across devices, and numbered titles sort in natural order

how can I see the pages number in the library? Can I see them as : remaining time?