Reed

An Android ebook reader with series organisation, dictionary look-ups, and an AI-built wiki of each series: characters, places, factions, abilities, items, creatures and lore (via your own Ollama server, or Claude, OpenAI, Grok, Gemini and other cloud APIs with your own API key).

Features

Reading

• EPUB, PDF, CBZ (comics), FB2 and TXT (FB2/TXT are converted to EPUB on import)
• Paginated or continuous scroll; text size, font (incl. Literata and OpenDyslexic), margins, line/paragraph spacing, alignment, hyphenation
• Light, sepia, dark and black themes; brightness, keep-screen-on, volume-key and tap-edge page turns
• Table of contents, bookmarks, highlights in 5 colours with notes, full-text search
• Read aloud (Android text-to-speech) with sentence highlighting and speed control

Library

• Import files, whole folders, or "Open with Reed" from a file manager
• Series detected from book metadata (Calibre/EPUB 3) or titles like "Unsouled (Cradle Book 1)"; reorder books, add/remove, rename
• Shelves (your own collections), search, sort, filters (reading / unread / finished)

Look-ups while reading: select text and choose

• Define: dictionary entry (Free Dictionary API / Wiktionary), plus "Explain in context" from your AI for invented words and names
• Wiki: the wiki page for a character, place, technique and so on; if there's no page yet, ask the AI what it is, add it yourself, or mark it as another name of an existing page
• PDFs and comics can't select text, so use the menu's Look up a word or name

Series wiki

• Each series (or standalone book) has a wiki with categories: Characters, Locations, Factions, Abilities, Items, Creatures and Lore. The "All" tab shows the most important pages of each.
• Character pages read like a fan wiki: an infobox (age, sex, species, rank, affiliations, first appearance, books), summary, appearance, personality, abilities, advancement (ranks/levels/stages reached, book by book), relationships, history per book, and "Mentioned in" links
• LitRPG status log: status screens, level-ups, stat changes and skill descriptions are logged where they happen in the book. A character's Status shows a game-style window (level, class, race, stats, abilities with their level and full description, titles) at any point in the story, with what changed and a history of every update. In the reader, Status (menu) shows it as of where you are, so later level-ups stay hidden.
• Other pages show what it is, details, key facts and connections (e.g. who uses a technique, who belongs to a faction)
• Every page has a Series tab (everything up to your spoiler limit) and a tab per book showing the page as it stood in that book
• Names on a page link to their own pages. Categories (groups, places, species, kinds, plus your own) can be browsed from the menu or by tapping one on a page.
• Search within a wiki (names, other names, abilities, categories, text) or across every wiki from the Wiki tab
• AI wiki: from a book's page, have the AI read the whole book, or only up to where you are (spoiler-free; continue later). "Analyse series" queues every book in order. It runs in the background, survives restarts, and resumes where it stopped.
• Pages are kept per book, so the wiki and the reader hide information from books you haven't reached. The reader warns when a page covers more of the current book than you've read.
• Find duplicates (wiki menu): the AI reads the whole wiki and lists pages that look like the same thing (a nickname, a title, a misspelling). For each one you pick the page and name to keep and merge, or say they're different so it isn't suggested again.
• Edit names, other names, role/type, categories and notes; set a picture; merge pages

Building

The Nix flake provides the JDK, Gradle and Android SDK:

direnv allow            # or: nix develop
./gradlew assembleDebug # -> app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk

Install on a phone with USB debugging (or wireless debugging) enabled:

adb install -r app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk

./gradlew testDebugUnitTest runs the unit tests.

A test emulator: nix run .#emulator (add -no-window to run headless).

Release build (faster)

Debug builds are debuggable, so Android runs them without most of its optimisations: scrolling, page turns and the library screens are noticeably slower. For everyday reading, build a release APK instead.

Release builds must be signed. If you don't have a key, make one (keep the file and its password safe: every later update has to be signed with the same key):

keytool -genkeypair -v -keystore ~/reed-release.jks -alias upload \
  -keyalg RSA -keysize 4096 -validity 10000

Then point Gradle at it in ~/.gradle/gradle.properties (or $GRADLE_USER_HOME/gradle.properties if you set that), which keeps the password out of the repo. Use an absolute path; ~ isn't expanded here:

RELEASE_STORE_FILE=/home/you/reed-release.jks
RELEASE_STORE_PASSWORD=your-password
RELEASE_KEY_ALIAS=upload
# RELEASE_KEY_PASSWORD=...  only if the key's password differs from the store's

Build and install:

./gradlew assembleRelease # -> app/build/outputs/apk/release/app-release.apk
adb install -r app/build/outputs/apk/release/app-release.apk

The debug and release builds are signed with different keys, so one can't be installed over the other. Uninstall the debug build first; this deletes its library and wikis.

Setting up the AI

In Settings → AI, pick a Provider:

• Ollama (your own server): free and private; runs on your own computer.
• Claude, OpenAI, Grok, Google Gemini, OpenRouter, Mistral, DeepSeek or Groq: paste an API key from that provider ("Get an API key" opens the right page). The book's text is sent to them and they bill you per token, so analysing a whole book costs money. A Claude Pro/Max subscription can't be used here; Claude needs an API key from the Claude Console, billed separately.
• Other (OpenAI-compatible): LM Studio, llama.cpp, vLLM and similar servers. Enter the address including /v1.

Then tap Connect, pick or type a model, open a book's page and choose Analyse up to where I am or Analyse whole book.

API keys are encrypted with a key kept in the Android Keystore. They aren't restored from a backup onto another phone, so enter them again there.

Ollama

1. Make Ollama listen on your network. Set OLLAMA_HOST=0.0.0.0 in the service environment; on NixOS that's services.ollama.host = "0.0.0.0";.
2. In Reed, choose Ollama, enter http://<your-pc-ip>:11434, tap Connect, and pick a model.

Tips:

• qwen3.5:35b gave good results in testing, at about 1-1.5 min per 24k-character passage (a typical novel is 15-40 passages). Building the full wiki takes longer than characters alone used to, since the model writes more per passage.
• Books analysed before the wiki existed only have characters. Use Start over on a book's page to add abilities, ranks and the other pages.
• Passage size trades fewer requests against needing a bigger context window. The context size is picked automatically and sent as num_ctx.
• "Let the model think" helps reasoning models a little, but is much slower. On Claude it raises the effort level (and turns on extended thinking where the model has it); on OpenAI-style APIs it sends reasoning_effort: high.
• Use the Ollama provider for Ollama rather than its OpenAI-compatible /v1 address: only the native API lets Reed set the context window.

Project layout

app/src/main/java/xyz/mrfluffy/reed/
  ai/           AI clients (Ollama, Claude, OpenAI-compatible), prompts, text extraction,
                analysis pipeline + worker
  wiki/         Wiki pages, spoiler filtering, links, categories, search, dedupe
  data/         Room database, settings (DataStore)
  dictionary/   Dictionary look-ups
  library/      Import, TXT/FB2 to EPUB conversion, series/shelves
  readium/      Readium setup (EPUB/PDF engine)
  reader/       Reader activity, preferences, overlay UI and sheets
  ui/           Library, book, series, wiki and settings screens

License

Reed is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See LICENSE for the full text.