ReadAware

Getting started

ReadAware opens your own files and keeps everything it learns on your device. This page walks the first hour: importing books, reading and annotating, and — optionally — connecting an AI.

Add your books

Import files from the shelf — or skip the button entirely: drop book files anywhere on the window, or make ReadAware the default app for your book formats and double-click them in your file manager, which opens the book straight in the reader and adds it to the shelf on the way. ReadAware reads EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, FB2, CBZ, CBR, TXT, HTML, and PDF directly — there is no conversion step and no cloud upload. The file you import is the file you keep; highlights, notes, and your position attach to the original text.

DRM-protected files cannot be opened — a book bought from a store that locks its files stays locked. If a book refuses to open and the format is supported, that is almost always why.

Read

Every format opens in the same reader with the same controls. Three reading modes are available from the reader's appearance settings:

  • Continuous scroll — the default; the book flows as one column.
  • Single page — one page at a time, turned like paper.
  • Two pages — a book-like spread on wide screens.

Your position is saved per book, and the table of contents is always a click away in the reader's top bar.

The same appearance settings carry the typography: font, size, weight, line spacing, paragraph spacing, margins, and page color. Text alignment defaults to As published — whatever the book's own stylesheet asked for — and can be forced left or justified if you'd rather it were uniform everywhere.

Fixed-layout books — PDFs and comics — are pages someone else already typeset, so there is no typography in them to change and those controls are hidden. Page color still applies: a light one tints the paper as the page is drawn, leaving every ink and photograph as printed, and a dark one redraws the page in two tones so the text stays readable. Set Page Rendering to Original to keep a book on its own colors — remembered per book, for the art and photography where the color is the point.

Listen

Any book can be read aloud. Read-aloud rides the same sentence and paragraph navigator you read by — start the navigator, then press play in its bar, and the book advances one unit at a time with the spoken text marked as it goes.

Out of the box this speaks with your device's own voice, which needs no key and no network. Enabling a voice plugin — the bundled TTS Voices plugin, or any other — is itself the choice to speak through that engine instead; which voice it uses is configured in that plugin's own settings, alongside its provider and any custom endpoint. There is no separate voice picker to keep in sync.

Annotate

Select any passage and a quiet action menu appears:

  • Highlight — in a few colors, or as an underline.
  • Note — attach your own words to the passage.
  • Look up — the built-in dictionary explains the word in its sentence, not just in the abstract, and saves it to the Dictionary timeline. (Uses your configured AI.)

Everything you mark is collected per book and feeds the app's memory — annotations are not an archive, they are material the assistant reads.

Connect an AI

All of ReadAware's intelligence runs on a key you bring. Reading, annotating, and the library work fully without one; the assistant, dictionary, and memory need it.

  1. Open Settings → AI.
  2. Pick a provider — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenRouter, DeepSeek, xAI, Groq, Mistral, Moonshot, Z.ai, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint via Custom.
  3. Paste your API key and choose a model.

ReadAware distinguishes a smart model (chat and synthesis) from a fast one (dictionary look-ups, summaries, memory upkeep); sensible defaults are filled in per provider. Your key is stored on your device and requests go directly to your provider — there is no ReadAware server in between.

Ask

Each book has one persistent conversation — open the chat panel while reading and ask about the passage, the chapter, or the book. On the Context page you can talk across your whole shelf in as many threads as you like.

The assistant works from your reading: your highlights, notes, earlier conversations, and a long-term memory it maintains about what you read and care about. That memory is built and stored locally, like everything else.

Move fast

The command palette (Cmd K on macOS, Ctrl K elsewhere — rebindable in Settings) reaches every action: open books, switch views, run plugin commands.

Sync across devices

ReadAware works fully offline, and syncing is strictly optional. When you want your library on more than one device, open Settings → Data & Sync and sign in with Google or GitHub, then set an encryption passphrase. Everything that syncs — books, reading positions, highlights, notes, AI conversations, covers — is end-to-end encrypted with a key derived from that passphrase, so the relay only ever stores ciphertext. Keep the passphrase safe: without it, a new device cannot decrypt your data, and neither can we.

Your preferences travel too. Themes, typography, AI provider settings, and API keys roam with the account, so a fresh install feels like your own within a minute of signing in. A per-book panel in Data & Sync shows exactly what has reached the cloud, and the free tier's quota can be raised with a paid plan when your library outgrows it.

Where your data lives

Books, annotations, conversations, and memory are stored on your device. The network is used for AI requests to your own provider — and, if you connect a sync account, an end-to-end-encrypted relay that keeps your library in step across devices. The app stays fully usable offline either way.

Sync keeps out of sight while it works: its progress lives in Settings → Data & Sync, and the main window only speaks when something fails — one quiet error you can silence for a day.