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books

2026

A native iPhone reader for PDF and EPUB. Library, notes, study cards, and a model on the passage you select.

Year
2026
Stack
  • Swift
  • SwiftUI
  • SwiftData

books is a reader for the iPhone. The icon on the home screen says Reader. Open a PDF or an EPUB, and the file stays on the phone.

Five tabs

  • Library — import from Files. The app keeps its own copy.
  • Reader — PDFKit for a PDF, a composed page for an EPUB. The page has a theme. Leave and come back to the same place.
  • Notebook — bookmarks and notes, each one a door back to the passage.
  • Deck — cards from what you marked.
  • Learning — the vocabulary card in play, and how far each book has gone.

A selection

Long-press a sentence. The bar is Define, Translate, Explain, Summary, Note.

The model is a setting in the app.

  • Apple Intelligence, on the device.
  • ChatGPT and Grok, through the account you already have. You sign in with a device code. The token sits in the Keychain.
  • DeepSeek and MiMo, if you paste a key. Those two bill as API calls.

Spotlight can open a book or a note.

On the machine

SwiftUI and SwiftData. I run it from the Xcode project.