An iOS reading app that doesn't fight you.
Apple Books makes PDFs miserable, note-taking painful, and getting your notes out nearly impossible. inkread fixes that:
- PDF → EPUB conversion — import any PDF and read it as a reflowable EPUB with proper typography instead of pinch-zooming a fixed page.
- Listen like an audiobook — any book, read aloud with the on-device iOS AI voices. Pick up where you left off, sentence-level tracking.
- Frictionless notes & highlights — select, highlight, annotate. No modal maze.
- Your notes are yours — export all highlights and notes for a book as clean Markdown (pastes perfectly into Notion, Obsidian, anywhere) or share individual passages with attribution via the share sheet.
- Local-first library — books live on device; sync and community translations are on the roadmap.
Early development. Private while licensing implications of the conversion pipeline are sorted out.
- EPUB import — read existing EPUBs, not just converted PDFs (parser lands in
core/epub). - Sync — local-first library synced through a small backend; books and annotations as CRDT-ish merge of per-device state.
- Community translations — translate chapters on device (or via an LLM backend), push translations up for other readers of the same book;
TextLocatoroffsets already give stable anchor points. - Notion API export — direct push of notes to a Notion database as an alternative to Markdown share.
- Background audio — keep TTS playing with the screen locked (needs
UIBackgroundModes: audioin a dev build; Expo Go can't).
Yarn 4 workspaces monorepo:
| Package | What it is |
|---|---|
packages/core |
Pure TypeScript: PDF-text → chapter segmentation, EPUB 3 builder, annotation models, Markdown export. Unit-tested with vitest. |
packages/mobile |
Expo (React Native) iOS app. Reader UI, TTS playback, pdf.js extraction, SQLite storage. |
packages/web |
Next.js 16 e-reader + API. Supabase auth, repository-abstracted data layer, browser pdf.js import, speechSynthesis listen mode. |
packages/desktop |
Electron shell wrapping the web e-reader (yarn desktop). |
yarn install
yarn test # core unit tests
yarn ios # run the app on an iOS simulatorSee AGENTS.md for architecture and CONTRIBUTING.md for conventions.