Changelog
What changed in each release, written for the people using it. Every version's complete notes and downloads live on GitHub.
0.6.5Cambria
Release notes →This Cambria patch lets you zoom into PDF and comic pages, lock a zoomed view while you turn pages, and rebuilds the contents of books that barely have one.
New
- Zoom for PDFs and comics. Pinch on the trackpad or touch screen, or press ⌘= and ⌘− (Ctrl on Windows and Linux). The spot under your fingers stays put, and a zoomed page scrolls in every direction. Reading appearance lets you choose whether 100% fits the page's width or the whole page.
- One click back to the fit. The percentage shows while you zoom, and while the reader's controls are up a zoomed page keeps it on screen with a button back to 100%. ⌘0 does the same.
- Lock a zoomed view. In single- and two-page modes, lock the view from the zoom indicator or with ⌘L. The wheel, arrow keys and swipes turn pages again, and every page opens on the same part — one column of a research paper, page after page.
- Contents for books that barely have one. Book sets whose contents list only their volumes, and PDFs without an outline, get a nested contents list recovered from their headings.
Improved
- Your place on a zoomed page. Each book remembers its zoom and where on the page you were reading, so it reopens on the same passage.
- Sharp at any zoom. Past the render budget, the part of a PDF page on screen is drawn again at full resolution.
- Chapter summaries that follow the real chapters. Chapters are worked out once for the reader and the assistant, so multi-part books and book sets are summarized chapter by chapter.
- Large Kindle books. Big or slightly damaged KF8/AZW3 files open reliably, and jumps inside them take milliseconds instead of seconds.
- Publisher layouts stay in the column. Covers, code, wide tables and positioned blocks no longer render blank or spill onto the next page.
Fixed
- Missing covers. EPUB covers named by file path now appear, and a cover that never reached this device is taken again from the book file.
- Progress bar jumps. Jumping with the progress bar while a chapter change is still animating no longer gets lost.
- Old backups. Backups now use the encrypted archive only; an old v1 JSON backup is recognized and explained instead of reported as a wrong password.
0.6.4Cambria
Release notes →This Cambria patch moves the reader's controls within reach of your thumb on a phone, lets panels swipe away, and opens books faster on iPhone.
New
- Phone reader controls at the bottom. On a phone, contents, notes, reading mode, appearance and chat sit in a toolbar at the bottom of the screen, while the top bar keeps back, the title and More. Arrange the toolbar in Settings → Customize, separately from the desktop header.
- Appearance and notes open from the bottom bar. The bar grows upward to hold them instead of a card floating over the page; pull it down to close it. Appearance leads with text size and page colors, with fonts and finer typography one tap away.
- Swipe panels away. Contents and chat close with the back swipe from the left edge, or by dragging them out the way they came. A note swipes left to delete it.
Improved
- Faster book opening on iPhone. Large books open markedly faster; a long biography went from about 1.3 seconds to 0.5 on an iPhone 14 Pro.
- Controls that appear at once. A tap on the page no longer waits a quarter second before showing the reader's controls.
- Notes that are easier to scan. The notes list uses the app's own type rather than the book's, with each highlight's color beside its passage.
Fixed
- Status bar on iPhone. The status bar hides while reading again.
- Damaged MOBI files. A damaged MOBI file is reported as a damaged copy instead of as DRM-protected.
0.6.3Cambria
Release notes →This Cambria patch starts ReadAware again on e-readers with an older browser engine, and reopens books where you last read, including after turning back.
Fixed
- Could not start on some Android e-readers. Devices whose system web engine dates from before late 2023, such as many e-ink readers without Google Play, have stopped at a "Could not start" screen since 0.6.0. The app now fills in the engine features it relies on itself, and that screen names the engine version so a report can be acted on.
- Books reopening at a page you had left. Since 0.6.0 the app kept the furthest page you had reached and ignored turning back, so closing a book after going back to an earlier page reopened it at the later one. A book now reopens where you last were, on every device, and existing progress is corrected from your reading history on first launch.
0.6.2Cambria
Release notes →This Cambria patch gives Sentence Reader a hold menu on phones, draws your marks the moment you make them, repairs broken tables of contents on open, and brings back the end-of-book screen.
New
- A hold menu for Sentence Reader on phones. The bottom toolbar is gone on phones and tablets. Press and hold anywhere on the page to open the current sentence's actions under your finger: highlight, underline, note, ask AI, copy and read aloud. Slide onto an action and lift to run it, or lift in place and tap. Navigation, the sentence and paragraph switch, plugin lookups, the panels and exit sit behind More. Tapping the highlighted sentence opens the same menu.
Improved
- Marks appear instantly. A new highlight or underline is drawn as soon as it is saved instead of up to a second later, and books with many marks no longer repaint all of them for each new one.
Fixed
- Tables of contents that aimed every chapter at the cover. Some converted books list every chapter but point them all at the first page, so navigation landed on the cover, the chapter label was wrong and continuous scroll treated the whole book as one chapter. The reader now relocates those entries to the chapters that open with their titles.
- The end-of-book screen is reachable again. Turning past the last page did nothing on desktop or phones. Keyboard, wheel, tap and swipe now all finish the book.
- Sentence actions on touch. Tapping the highlighted sentence opens its actions again; the previous release stepped to the next sentence instead.
- AI providers on custom ports. HTTP provider addresses with a non-default port are accepted.
0.6.1Cambria
Release notes →This Cambria update opens large books instantly in continuous scroll, makes Sentence Reader dependable on phones, and lets Beta channel devices find updates anywhere.
New
- Read on from the page you turned to. In paginated layouts, after you flip pages by hand, the next tap or volume-key step in Sentence Reader continues from the page you are looking at. The sentence you left stays one tap away behind Back to current sentence.
- A go-to box in Jumper. One field answers with chapters, printed pages, and a live text search of the book, with the table of contents and your current chapter underneath. Plugins can now offer their own search in list views.
- Web search on by default. Add your search provider's API key to use web search with the assistant. The update dialog offers a shortcut to AI settings when the key is missing and respects an existing choice to keep search off.
Improved
- Instant opening in continuous scroll. Books whose chapters span dozens of files used to take seconds to open or jump. The reader now shows the target page at once and keeps only the files around your position loaded, without moving the text under you.
- Fast search in long books. Case- and accent-insensitive text search now folds each section once, so a full-book query that took minutes completes in under a second.
- Sentences split the way a reader expects. Opening quotes start the line of dialogue they open, abbreviations such as Mr., Dr., and e.g. no longer end a sentence, and footnote numbers no longer fuse two sentences together.
- Steadier sentence stepping on phones. The viewport stays put while you step through visible text, sentences that span a page boundary are revealed before advancing, and tapping the highlighted sentence keeps advancing. The compact toolbar keeps annotation actions and exit on one row.
- A Beta channel that works everywhere. Beta updates are found through a fixed release pointer instead of the GitHub API, so devices on shared networks or where the API is blocked now see new betas.
Fixed
- Fewer blank screens when opening large books. Reading positions restore even when the saved location has no visible rectangle, PDF pages wait for layout before restoring, and chapter jumps in scroll mode no longer leave the previous chapter on screen.
- Sentence Reader controls on Android. Volume keys work again while a note or chat field has focus, and a dragged toolbar can no longer be parked under the status bar or the gesture strip.
- Phone sheets stay out of the way. The table of contents and chat sheets close when the reader chrome hides and no longer reappear over the page when a book is reopened.
- Two plugins retired. The Reading Goals and Annotations plugins are removed. The reader handles annotations natively, and the assistant carries reading intent without a plugin.
0.6.0Cambria
Release notes →Cambria keeps your furthest reading progress across devices, brings web sources and images into the assistant, and makes your library easier to back up and use with other tools.
New
- Web research with your own keys. Connect TinyFish, Exa, Tavily, SerpAPI, or Brave for web search and retrieval. The assistant stays with your selected provider, links to sources, and can show relevant images. Models that support vision can also inspect image content.
- Encrypted backups of your reading workspace. Create a full encrypted backup of your books, annotations, conversations, memory, settings, and plugin data. Review what will be restored before merging it into another installation, while keeping that device's account session and local settings.
- Your library in other assistants. An optional, token-protected local HTTP API lets other tools read your library and reading context. Copy the ReadAware skill installation prompt from Settings to connect a compatible assistant.
Improved
- A more useful reading assistant. Retry a failed model step without starting the conversation over, and expand one grouped view to inspect tool activity. Fiction retains reading-progress spoiler protection, while history and biography can use relevant factual context.
- A reader that remembers your preferences. Font choices are remembered by book language, two-page layouts have more room, and chapter navigation follows the table of contents even when several chapters share one source file.
- More capable plugins. Plugins can work with more of your reading workspace through scoped permissions. Updated navigation, annotations, and reading goals make their everyday controls simpler, while plugin sync transports have their own settings and a manual Sync now action.
- Help shape ReadAware. The update dialog now offers a direct way to star ReadAware on GitHub or join the Discord community. About includes a small credit to AHpx at the bottom.
Fixed
- Offline progress no longer moves backward. Sync keeps the furthest reading position across devices. If an offline device has reached page 300 and another device has a newer record at page 200, reconnecting keeps page 300. Reading time is handled separately from reading position.
- More accurate reading time and smoother navigation. Reading sessions pause while the app is idle or in the background. Touch annotations respond more reliably, and chapter transitions in scroll mode no longer drift into the wrong section.
0.5.4Lake Baikal
Release notes →ReadAware remembers your desktop window, imports books more reliably on Android, and brings you back to the right passage when you resume reading.
New
- Your window stays yours. The desktop app remembers its size, position, and maximized or fullscreen state when you close it. Returning from maximized keeps your previous window size and position, and disconnecting a monitor no longer leaves the window out of reach. These settings stay on each device.
Fixed
- More reliable Android imports. Books picked through Android's file picker now pass through the app's private cache, avoiding import failures caused by unavailable or unwritable external cache folders.
- EPUBs on older Android WebViews. EPUB metadata no longer depends on newer browser functions that some Android WebViews lack, fixing failures when importing or opening books on those devices.
- Return to the right passage. Saved reading positions and passage links return you to the intended passage in scroll mode. Forward and backward navigation also moves by the reader's visible height instead of a single pixel.
0.5.2Lake Baikal
Release notes →Importing gets instant and covers stop hiding. Books land on the shelf with their cover in a fraction of a second, covers now reach your other devices without opening anything, Kindle-format books open cleanly again, and macOS builds are signed and notarized.
New
- Signed and notarized on macOS. ReadAware for macOS is now signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens on first launch like any other app — no Open Anyway, no Terminal workaround.
- A cover for every book. A book that declares no cover now shows its first in-book illustration on the shelf — EPUB, MOBI, AZW3 and FB2 alike — so files from converters and scans stop landing as blank tiles.
- Delete your account in the app. Settings → Data & Sync can delete your sync account outright. The relay cancels any billing and erases everything it held for you.
Improved
- Import in a blink. Picking a book copies it, checks for duplicates by content, reads its metadata and files its cover in one native step; a 36 MB EPUB reaches the shelf in about a tenth of a second, with its real title, author and cover already in place. Importing a book you already have is recognized even under a different file name and copies nothing.
- PDF covers and titles on every platform. Windows, Linux, iOS and Android render a PDF's cover right after import instead of waiting for you to open it, and PDF titles and authors are read from the document everywhere.
- Covers follow your books across devices. Synced books used to sit coverless until you opened them. Covers now travel ahead of the book file, and each device keeps fetching the ones it is missing after every sync, repainting the tile the moment one arrives.
- A lighter shelf. Cover artwork no longer rides inside the library data; each tile loads its cover straight from local storage, so large libraries open faster and use far less memory.
- Chapter marks for Kindle books. The progress bar now shows chapter boundaries for MOBI and AZW3 books too.
Fixed
- MOBI and AZW3 books open without errors. The contents repair mistook every Kindle-format book for one without a usable table of contents and filled it with entries the reader could not resolve, raising an error per chapter the moment the book opened.
- Switching books inside the reader. Opening another file while a book is open no longer throws layout errors from the book being closed.
- Old-style EPUB covers. A cover page listed in the guide, or a cover entry pointing at an image path instead of an id, is now found at import instead of showing a placeholder until first open.
0.5.1Lake Baikal
Release notes →Sync goes self-hosted and PDFs grow up. A new WebDAV plugin syncs your encrypted library through your own server; PDFs open in about a second, scroll as one continuous document, and select text precisely; and the shelf learns drag and drop.
New
- Sync through your own server. The new WebDAV Sync plugin turns any WebDAV host — Nextcloud, 坚果云, and friends — into a sync backend. Your library is end-to-end encrypted before it leaves the device, so the server only ever stores sealed data it cannot read; connect each device with the same server and passphrase and everything converges, books included.
- Sync backends as plugins. Plugin developers get a new sync:transport capability: the app keeps encryption, the event log, and merge, while a plugin only carries sealed data to the remote of its choosing. WebDAV is the first tenant.
- PDFs scroll like PDFs. Scroll mode for PDFs and comics is now one continuous document: the scrollbar spans every page, jumps land anywhere instantly, and pages flow past without swapping screens. Scroll is now the default for these books, and their layout choice is remembered separately, so paging through a novel and scrolling a paper no longer fight over one setting.
- Drag and drop on the shelf. Books drag straight onto a collection, and while you drag, a dock appears with every collection plus new collection and remove as drop zones. Dragging a selected book carries the whole selection along.
Improved
- Big PDFs open in about a second. A large scanned book could take half a minute before its first page appeared and stall again on its outline; the reader now fetches only the bytes the visible page needs.
- Page turns in single and double-page modes are instant: nearby pages render ahead of you and recently read ones stay warm. Short documents stay fully rendered.
- Selecting text in a PDF no longer glitches when the drag starts a little off the letters — the selection follows your pointer the way it should.
Fixed
- Plugin network access broke in 0.5.0 — RSS feed refresh and text-to-speech failed with a permissions error no permission could fix. Both work again.
- PDFs imported while the window was covered or in another Space ended up coverless until first opened; covers now render regardless.
- Dragging a book inside the shelf no longer summons the drop-to-import overlay.
0.5.0Lake Baikal
Release notes →Your library learns to travel. End-to-end encrypted sync carries books, progress, annotations, and AI conversations across devices; the book memory builds while you read; and every error in the app now speaks like a person.
New
- Sync across devices. Sign in with Google or GitHub, set a passphrase, and your books, reading positions, highlights, notes, AI conversations, and covers follow you — end-to-end encrypted, so the server only ever sees ciphertext. Changes arrive live, big books travel in resumable chunks, and a per-book panel shows exactly what has reached the cloud.
- Settings that roam. Themes, typography, AI provider settings, and API keys travel with your account. A fresh install feels like your own within a minute of signing in.
- A book memory that keeps up. The character and concept graph now builds in the first minutes after you open a book instead of over hours of idle time. The assistant queries it on demand, tells narrative books from expository ones, merges character nicknames, and mines your older conversations for memories instead of forgetting them.
- Two update channels. Choose Stable or Beta in Settings → About, and a What's New dialog walks you through each upgrade.
- Crash follow-up. If ReadAware crashes, the next launch offers to send a diagnostics report — with a preview, and never without your confirmation.
Improved
- Every error in the app was rebuilt to speak plainly: localized, actionable messages instead of raw error dumps, retry offered only when retrying can help, and a direct link to the fix when one exists.
- The OpenRouter model picker now searches the full catalog with pricing shown inline, and Ollama Cloud joins the provider list.
- Plugin updates stage with automatic rollback, and plugins can now ship their own app and reader themes.
- Scanned PDFs get their text extracted, so the assistant can finally read them. Page turns work from the mouse wheel in paginated mode.
Fixed
- Android can finally import TXT files — the system picker's type filter predated TXT support and greyed them out. TXT files also offer ReadAware in "Open with" on every platform.
- Importing the same book twice now recognizes the duplicate and keeps one copy.
0.4.2
Release notes →A patch that opens the front door: book files open straight from your file manager, drag-and-drop imports, and every illustration gets a full-screen viewer.
New
- Open with ReadAware. Make ReadAware the default app for your book files and double-clicking one lands directly in the reader, with the book added to your shelf on the way. If the app is already running, the existing window takes over — no second copy.
- Drop books to import. Drag book files anywhere onto the window and they import on the spot.
- A closer look at illustrations. Tap an image in any book to view it full screen. Zoom around the cursor with the wheel or a pinch, drag to pan, double-click to toggle fit, and a small toolbar covers zoom, rotation, copying to the clipboard, and closing.
0.4.1
Release notes →A patch for the statistics page and the sentence reader: charts you can tap, and a plugin that finally keeps its settings — plus a progress readout and a session timer — under its own roof.
New
- Tap the charts. The reading-stats bars now hand the ink highlight to whichever bar you tap — daily, weekday, and time-of-day charts alike — and it stays where you put it.
- The sentence reader keeps its own settings. Step unit, tap to advance, and swipe to step moved into the plugin's own settings page, joined by two new options: a chapter position readout (12 / 87) and a session timer that restarts on every entry and is never saved. Both live on a small floating chip you can drag anywhere.
Improved
- Chart tooltips traded their floating card for a quiet ink label pinned above the bars.
- The About page shows the series codename beside the version.
Fixed
- The Total time headline no longer overflows on phones, and tapping a chart no longer draws a focus ring.
- Turning the readouts off in settings applies without restarting the app.
- iOS no longer shows two selection menus at once in the reader.
0.4.0El Alto
Release notes →The first release of the El Alto series, and a release about distance: the actions you need while reading moved onto the sentence itself, the panels worth opening moved one tap away, and the assistant stopped taking detours before answering.
New
- Tap the sentence. In sentence or paragraph reading, tapping the highlighted sentence opens its actions right there — copy, highlight, underline, note, ask AI, dictionary — instead of a reach for the bottom bar.
- Doors instead of a toolbar. The floating navigator strip opens the table of contents, your notes, reading appearance, or chat in one tap, and pages itself on phones so it always fits one row.
- Updates introduce themselves. After the app updates, a quiet link opens this changelog in your language. Dismiss it, or let it fade on its own after two days.
Improved
- The reading assistant answers in the language you write in, reports reading time in hours and minutes rather than raw counters, and no longer inventories your stats before answering a question about the book.
- Spoiler protection now also fences what the assistant may already know about a famous novel — nothing beyond your reading position, unless you explicitly ask to be spoiled.
Fixed
- External links — the About panel, the what's-new door — actually open your browser now.
- A pasted API key is refused without being echoed back into the conversation.
- Book cards can no longer be presented twice in one reply.
0.3.1
Release notes →A release about PDFs, and about the reader chrome knowing when to get out of the way. A PDF page is a picture, so the page color never reached it and every fixed-layout book stayed on white paper inside a dark app — that is fixed, along with the controls those books were offering but could not honor.
New
- PDFs follow the page color. A light palette tints the paper as the page is drawn, leaving every ink and photograph exactly as printed. A dark palette redraws the page in two tones, so the text stays readable instead of sitting as black ink on a dark sheet.
- Page Rendering. Keep a book on its original colors while everything else follows your palette. Remembered per book, for the art and photography where the color is the point.
Improved
- Fixed-layout books no longer offer typography they cannot honor. A PDF or comic is a sequence of pages someone else already typeset, so font, size, weight, spacing, alignment and margins are gone for those books. Page color and reading mode stay, because both still do visible work.
Fixed
- The reader toolbar no longer flashes up and vanishes a moment after you tap the page. Anything that re-flows the text — the soft keyboard, rotating the device, changing the font size — was being mistaken for a page turn.
- The chat composer takes the caret when you open the panel, not every time the toolbar reappears. On a phone that had been throwing the keyboard over a page you only meant to glance at.
0.3.0
Release notes →The release where the app stops being a fixed set of features and becomes something you extend. Plugins run in real sandboxes, contribute to almost every surface, and ship through a marketplace. The agent grows tools and traces, the reader grows an ending, and both the book and the conversation are now yours to typeset.
New
- Plugins. A full plugin system: sandboxed workers with permission-gated capabilities, a TypeScript-first authoring path, and a marketplace with install-time consent. Plugins contribute reader menus, headers, command-palette entries, whole pages, AI tools, dictionary lookups, themes and bundled fonts, voice engines, scheduled tasks, and even virtual books that live on your shelf like any other title. Five ship built in — Dictionary, RSS Reader, Sentence Reader, TTS Voices, and Editorial Themes.
- Read-aloud. The reader speaks, following the same sentence and paragraph navigator you read by. Any TTS engine can plug in, with per-provider voices and custom endpoints.
- An ending. Finishing a book now lands on an end-of-book screen instead of a dead stop, with an optional look back written by the agent.
- Agent as a destination. The agent gets its own primary page with multiple threads, grounding in where you actually are in the book, expandable execution traces, and tools that can safely read and change your settings.
- More formats. CBZ, CBR, TXT, and HTML join EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, FB2, and PDF. Covers and metadata fill in at import.
- Make it yours. Primary navigation and every menu surface are drag-arrangeable. The command palette works while reading, and Mod+1..9 jumps between destinations.
- Typography for the app, not just the book. Chat replies, notes, and plugin views get their own font, size, and line spacing — following your reading settings by default, or detached if you'd rather. Text alignment becomes a reading setting too, defaulting to whatever the publisher chose.
Improved
- The progress bar in the reader header is a scrubber you can drag.
- Fixed-layout books (PDF, comics) take annotations and swipe page turns.
- AI provider setup is simpler, remembers a model per provider, and supports per-tier thinking effort for smart and fast models.
- Your API key is encrypted at rest, and AI requests route through native HTTP instead of the webview.
- All state changes are event-sourced: projections rebuild from an append-only log and can be verified against it.
- The shelf grid fills wide windows, and book titles from file names come out clean.
- The desktop app inherits your macOS system proxy.
- Dev builds get their own identity and data directory, so they no longer share the release app's library.
- Docs and blog on readaware.app are now available in English, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese.
Fixed
- Books whose stylesheets pin a near-black text color are no longer invisible on the dark page color — a whole class of calibre-converted EPUBs was unreadable in dark mode.
- EPUB 3 inline footnote bodies stay hidden and open in a popover, instead of dumping a chapter's worth of notes into the prose.
- The line-spacing setting now works on books that declare their own line height on paragraphs, where it previously did nothing at all.
- Chapter headings in real-world .txt files are recognized.
- Android ships with its built-in plugins, and serves plugin assets over the scheme it actually uses.
- The marketplace remembers the last mirror that worked.
- Stray taps on the reader's progress bar no longer seek on touch devices.
- Plugin pages scroll as pages, virtual rows re-measure when content above them changes, and open settings forms adopt external writes instead of shadowing them.
- Marketplace file paths are allowlist-validated, closing a Windows drive-relative path bypass.