An Android e-reader for people who write in the margins.
Select a passage, say or type what it made you think, and find every passage and note again in one place.
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| Your shelf | Notes live in the margin | Say it or type it |
Most readers treat notes as an afterthought: a highlighter colour, a tiny text box, a menu three taps deep. Reed is built the other way round. Reading stays quiet and full-screen, and the moment something strikes you, the note is one selection and one tap away, with a big microphone button so you can just say it.
Your own words are always set in graphite, the book's in ink, so you can tell them apart on every screen.
Notes beside the text
- Select any passage and tap Note, or note a whole page.
- Noted passages get a thin graphite stroke in the margin and a fine underline: present, never in the way.
- Tap the stroke to reread, edit or delete the note.
Dictation that's actually one tap
- Big mic button in the note sheet; with a speech service installed, words appear as you speak.
- Switch between English and German per note.
- Uses the phone's speech service, or a private on-device app like FUTO Voice Input (works on GrapheneOS).
Listen to the book
- Tap the headphones to have the book read aloud, sentence by sentence; pages turn with the voice and a dotted line marks the sentence being read.
- Keeps going with the screen off or the book closed, with controls in the notification, on the lock screen and on headphones.
- Remembers where it stopped: play again and it picks up at that sentence, or at the top of the page you've turned to.
- Reed's own voices for German and English, downloaded once (with progress) the first time a book needs one, and run on the phone. Otherwise the phone's speech engine. EPUB only.
- If a book declares the wrong language, change it in the book's options (long-press in the library); that also fixes its hyphenation and the dictation default.
Every note, in context
- All passage and note pairs for a book, grouped by chapter, in reading order.
- Open them from inside the reader or from the library; tap one to jump straight back to that spot.
Reading, your way
- EPUB and PDF.
- Paper, Night and Black themes, designed for each rather than inverted.
- Literata, Source Serif, Atkinson Hyperlegible or the book's own typeface; size, line spacing and margins.
- Keeps the book's own layout, with hyphenation so justified text doesn't leave gaps.
Private books
- Hide a book and its notes from the library, search and Reading now.
- Unlock with fingerprint or your screen lock; everything locks again when you leave the app, and private screens stay blank in recent apps.
Your notes and books on your Nextcloud (optional)
- Off until you turn it on: library menu › Send notes to Nextcloud. You sign in on your Nextcloud's own page; Reed never sees your password.
- Notes stay in step with the home desktop app, which files each book as a Markdown note: what you write here shows up there, and edits or deletions there come back here.
- Optionally the books themselves too: a backup on your Nextcloud, and books added on another phone appear on this one.
- Private books stay on the phone unless you include them.
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| Every note, by chapter | Night theme | Reading settings |
Reed needs Android 11 or newer.
With Obtainium (recommended, gets updates automatically): tap the badge above on your phone, or in Obtainium choose Add app and enter https://github.com/cbrasser/reed.
Manually: download the APK from the latest release and open it.
Every release is signed with the same key, so updates install over each other and keep your notes. If you installed a build signed with a different key, uninstall it once first; that deletes its notes.
Reed listens through Android's speech-recognition service. If your phone has none (GrapheneOS, LineageOS without Google), install FUTO Voice Input: Reed opens its "speak now" screen and drops the text into your note, fully on-device, in English and German.
Reed brings its own voices (Piper models, run with sherpa-onnx): Thorsten for German and Cori for English, about 116 MB each. The first time a book in one of those languages is read aloud and the phone has no voice for it, Reed offers to download it and starts reading when it's ready. Library menu › Read-aloud voices lists them, to download one ahead of time or delete it. A downloaded voice is preferred over the phone's own engine; other languages use the phone's engine. Reed's voices need a 64-bit ARM phone.
| Format | Reading | Passage notes | Page notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| EPUB 2 / EPUB 3 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| ✓ | n/a | ✓ | |
| MOBI / AZW3 | Convert to EPUB with Calibre |
DRM-protected books can't be opened.
JAVA_HOME=/opt/homebrew/opt/openjdk@21/libexec/openjdk.jdk/Contents/Home ./gradlew :app:assembleDebugKotlin, Jetpack Compose and Material 3, with the Readium Kotlin toolkit for rendering, Room for storage, Android's SpeechRecognizer for dictation and sherpa-onnx for Reed's voices (its AAR is fetched and checksum-verified by the fetchSherpa Gradle task on the first build). Requires JDK 21 and the Android SDK (compileSdk 37). The design system is documented in DESIGN.md.
scripts/release.sh 0.2.0Tags v0.2.0, builds a signed APK, checks the signature, pushes the tag and publishes a GitHub release that Obtainium picks up. The version name comes from the tag and the version code from the commit count. The signing key stays on the maintainer's machine.
Reed is free software under the GNU General Public License v3.0: you can use, study, share and modify it, and versions you distribute must stay under the same licence.
Book covers and text in the screenshots are public-domain editions from Project Gutenberg. Bundled fonts (Schibsted Grotesk, Literata, Source Serif 4, Atkinson Hyperlegible Next) are under the SIL Open Font License; their licences are in app/src/main/assets/fonts/.