Calibre Reader for iPhone and iPad (developer here)

[no1wsn]

Hi all,

I'm the developer of Calibre Reader, an iPhone and iPad app for reading the books in your own calibre library. I started it just for myself, building it with a lot of help from AI, because I wanted my library on the iPad without copying books around. I picked the name back then without a thought of ever publishing it. By the time it grew into something worth sharing, the name had stuck.

So, to be clear about names: it's an independent app. It isn't affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by calibre or Kovid Goyal. It also has nothing to do with CalibReader, the app by another developer that's already here on the forum. Two apps with nearly the same name in the same place is funny, I know! I'm not out to compete with it; we've simply arrived at the same idea from different directions. Sorry for any mix-ups.

What it does:

It connects to calibre's own content server, calibre-web, Kavita, Komga, any OPDS catalogue, a WebDAV or FTP share, Dropbox and other cloud folders, or a calibre library folder on your NAS. You browse by author, series, tags and shelves as calibre has them.
It can also open a library copied to the device: it reads metadata.db directly. When you edit a book's details, they're written back to metadata.db, and calibre opens the library fine afterwards.
Formats: EPUB, PDF, MOBI, AZW3, FB2, DjVu, CHM, CBZ/CBR/CB7, Word documents. Books that need converting are converted on the device; nothing is uploaded anywhere. Even very large JPG scans of paintings and calligraphy open fine.
Scans of old books where each PDF page is a whole open book can be turned at the spine, one book page at a time. Large PDFs on your server can be read online, without downloading the whole file first; pages are fetched ahead as you read.
It plays audio and video too: audiobooks, music albums and films kept in the same library, with CarPlay in the car. That's simply how I organise my own files, so the app follows it.
Highlights and notes sync with calibre's annotations where the server supports it, and they can be exported.
The reader is customisable down to the details:
Themes with your own colours, a picture behind the page and even a sound playing behind the words.
The book's own fonts, or yours: import any font, choose one per language, and set size and boldness.
Line, letter and word spacing, and every margin.
Page curl, slide or scroll, auto-scroll, and two pages side by side.
Proper vertical text for Japanese and Chinese, paged or scrolled.
Notes and markup: highlights in many styles and colours, notes as bubbles or sticky notes, and handwriting with Apple Pencil on any PDF page. Pens, highlighters, shapes, text boxes and stickers; plus notebooks and manuscripts of your own. It's a bit of a mini Goodnotes inside the reader.
Read Aloud with natural voices made on the device, and Read Along: an audiobook kept in step with its book.
Parallel reading: two books open side by side, such as an original and its translation, lined up sentence by sentence and kept in step as you read. Read Aloud and Read Along follow along in both.
Your place, highlights and notes sync between your devices (a supporter feature).
It speaks your language: the whole interface and the built-in user guide are in 40 languages, and Read Aloud has natural voices for dozens of them. The translations were done by AI, so if you use the app in your own language, please tell me where the wording is off.
It's for DRM-free books only. It does not remove DRM, and never will.
It's license-clean: it doesn't take code it has no right to ship. DjVu support, for example, is a decoder I rewrote from scratch, not DjVuLibre (GPL) repackaged.
Privacy: you don't need an account to read, and the app has no analytics of its own. Your books and libraries go only between the app and your own servers. The one exception is the free version's single ad on Home, which comes from Google AdMob. It's there to help pay for the server behind friends, clubs and sync, though honestly it most likely won't cover it. If it bothers you, a DNS or network ad blocker stops it easily, and the app keeps working. Or DM me with the email address of your Calibre Reader account and I'll turn the ad off for you. Just please don't abuse that. The optional Calibre Reader account is only for the social parts: friends, book clubs and lending.

Money, up front: the app is free, with limits. Two online libraries (a calibre server with several libraries counts as one), two on the device, eight built-in themes plus one of your own, and one small ad on the Home screen. Supporter — Lifetime is a one-time purchase that lifts every limit and removes the ad. There's no subscription. Honestly, I don't expect many sales. The paid part is mostly practice for me in building something real with AI, and if it covers my Claude subscription, I'm happy. I know many people here prefer free software, and that's fine. The free version reads your whole library.

It's on iPhone and iPad today, and a Mac version is coming very soon. I mostly read on my iPad, but I use every platform: my own calibre and calibre-web run on Windows. Android, Windows and Linux versions are actually partly built already. They're unfinished only because I keep running out of AI usage quota. So if you think they're worth having, say so, and they'll move up the list.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6821815508 Website: https://calibrereader.com

Fair warning: it does a lot, and some functions I haven't tested myself yet, so you may well find rough edges. Please just give your feedback, big or small. With AI doing a lot of the work, turning a suggestion into a fix is quick, so don't hold back on wishes either. I'd especially value feedback from people who know calibre well: odd libraries, big servers, unusual formats. If you'd like the full version, just DM me the email address of your Calibre Reader account and I'll unlock the app for you.

One more thing to know: I built it entirely around my own way of reading, and the kinds of books I read and collect. Your way is surely different, so tell me which features you need. Please report bugs and requests here in this thread, or in the club inside the app. I'll be reading both and answering.

A big thank-you to Kovid Goyal and everyone who has worked on calibre, and to the calibre-web developers. None of this would exist without the years of work they've given away freely. Calibre Reader stands entirely on their shoulders.

And in the spirit of honesty: AI wrote this post too, from my notes. I think that's how it should be: AI should do the work for us, so that we have more time to read, which is how we get away from AI.


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