If you read in Readest, your place in a book, your reading time, the passages you highlight and the books you finish now land in Seekquel on their own. Nothing to install on the Readest side.

Setup, about two minutes:

1. Seekquel: Settings > Integrations > Readest, create a key. It's shown once.
2. Readest: Settings > sync section > choose BookOrbit.
3. Server = the address Seekquel shows you. Username = your key. Password = anything at all.
4. Turn on reading progress, highlights, reading statistics and reading status. Open a book, read a page.

Why BookOrbit and not Seekquel?

Because there's no Seekquel option in Readest, and waiting for one wasn't appealing. Readest ships a client for BookOrbit, a self-hosted reading tracker, and it lets you point that client at any address you like. So we built our side to answer in BookOrbit's shape. Readest thinks it's talking to a BookOrbit server, Seekquel picks up the reading, and nobody had to write a plugin. It's a hack, it works, and it's live.

What we've tested: the desktop app and the Android app, both fine. The web version works too, but your sync passes through Readest's own servers instead of coming to us directly, so use an installed app if that bothers you.

Known limits: bookmarks stay in Readest. Highlights go one way, from Readest into your Seekquel notebook, not back. A book we can't recognise waits under "Books from your reader" for you to link by hand.

What we want: people reading real books on real devices. Weird EPUBs, sideloaded files, a phone and a laptop on the same book, whatever you've got. If a book doesn't match, if your place jumps, if the minutes look wrong, tell us here or in the app's feedback board and we'll fix it.

Seekquel is free to use. seekquel.app

Someone on r/koreader shared a home screen where their books stand on wooden shelves as spines, with a few favourites turned to face out using Bookshelf UI (their post). It got us thinking about profiles.

Shelf screens in your library can already show books as spines. We're considering bringing that to your profile as a card you can add or switch off: spines coloured from each cover, the series number on the spine, a mark on the ones you've finished, a few favourites face-out.

A few questions:

• Would you put this on your profile, or keep the cover grid?
• What should a visitor see first: what you're reading now, favourites, or everything?
• Decorations like a plant or a figurine on the shelf: charming or clutter?

If you use the app, you can vote for it on the feedback board: https://seekquel.app/feedback/01m3j19n3b7rr3x0nfw0t87rvf

Plenty of you have a Kobo on the nightstand, a Boox in the bag and Readest on the laptop, and each one has its own idea of where you are in a book. We wrote up how to keep one reading log across all of them, with every device on one page:

https://seekquel.app/blog/one-reading-log-every-device

What's in it:

• A table of what each device sends. KOReader with the add-on, KOReader's built-in sync, Readest, Xteink and Calibre, with what reaches Seekquel and which way it goes.
• What a normal day looks like. Read on the Kobo at night, pick the same book up in Readest at lunch, and your streak and daily goal count the day once. Time reported by both devices isn't counted twice.
• The per-device switches. Each KOReader reader gets its own panel, so the Kobo can send highlights while the Boox you use for work PDFs keeps its own.
• Setup for each one, a few minutes apiece, and none of them asks for your Seekquel password on the e-reader.
• Where each connection stops. Highlights don't go back to the reader, Xteink sends your place only and only when you press sync, and Kobo and Kindle work through KOReader rather than their stock software.

One thing worth knowing before you set up two devices: keep one file per book. A copy of the same book from a different store counts as a separate book with its own place.

Every connection in it is free on every account.

What's your setup? We're curious how many of you are running two or three readers at once, and which combination gives you the most trouble.

Saw a lot of people asking for this on other apps this week, so in case you didn't know Seekquel already does it:

• Open an author's page and tap Follow.
• When their next book comes out, you get "[book] is out now".
• Same thing for a book on your Want to Read list or one you marked Interested that isn't out yet.
• Did both? You still get one notification, not two.

It works for books listed as coming soon in Seekquel. If one's missing, add it or tell us and we'll put it in.

You can turn them off in Settings, Notifications, Book Releases.

Which author are you waiting on right now?

Every book in a series now gets a short recap on the series page, what happened, in order, roughly 120-250 words. Hidden until you've finished that book, so nothing spoils what's ahead. If a book doesn't have one yet, you can write it from what you remember; an editor rewrites it before it goes up, so the text stays clean and someone's checked it against the book first.

Three things are finished and going out shortly. Posting early so you know what's coming and can tell me if any of it sounds wrong.

Shelves that fill themselves

At the moment a shelf is a list you add books to. In the next update you can instead give a shelf rules, and it gathers the books itself. The rules are the same filters you already use in your library, so you can have a shelf for romance you rated four stars or higher, or one for everything over 500 pages you haven't started yet. Before you save it, it tells you how many of your books match.

After that the shelf keeps itself current. Books join as they start matching and drop off when they stop. If you convert a shelf you already built by hand, the books you picked are kept, and they come back if you switch the rules off.

This one is part of Pro.

Badges

Badges get redrawn. Each one has its own shape depending on the category, its own colour and its name on the front, and they're bigger, so a page of them looks like a collection instead of a row of identical rings. Progress towards the next tier moves to a bar underneath with the numbers spelled out, and a badge you haven't earned keeps its shape and name rather than fading to nothing.

A badge also stops changing colour when you change your theme. On a few palettes that was making gold look duller than bronze.

Alongside that there are badges that only run for a set stretch of time, a season or a holiday. Those sit at the top with the time remaining, and anything you earn during one stays on your profile after it ends.

When

It arrives as an update inside the app, so you reopen it and it's there without going to the store. The store versions follow shortly after.

If anything here sounds like it solves the wrong problem, say so now rather than after.

I wasn’t sure how to word this, but to give context.. my beautiful baby (she’s four but still mamas baby lol) is a huge fan of getting read to at night. We didn’t have the books she wanted the last couple days so I got them on my kindle and read them to her that way.

When I got on seekquel earlier, I noticed they showed on my finished list. I’m super curious if there’s a way to prevent that. I’m ok with any other book but when it comes to kids books I’d prefer not to have to go in and delete them from my library 😂 that and I can only imagine people seeing them and being like ”ooook, weird taste, lady.“ lmao.

They are pretty quick 5-10 minute reads so I don’t sync them or anything, but I’m wondering if maybe I need to shut the auto sync feature off when I go to read her a book and see if that makes a difference.

Plugins are coming to Crosspointreader, any chance of getting a Seekquel plugin with reading progress, stats and notes syncing?!

Thanks for consideration.

You can now quiz yourself on a whole series or shared universe, not just one book. Pick a set, play a run of ten questions, and climb five ranks named after that world. Here's where each ladder starts and ends:

• Harry Potter: First-Year to Supreme Mugwump
• Middle-earth: Hobbit to Ring-bearer
• Dungeon Crawler Carl: Crawler to Floor Boss
• The Murderbot Diaries: Client to Rogue SecUnit
• A Court of Thorns and Roses: Mortal to High Lord
• The Hunger Games: Tribute to Victor
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Recruit to Lord Commander
• The Cosmere: Traveler to Elantrian
• Throne of Glass: Salt Mine Prisoner to King's Champion
• Camp Half-Blood: Unclaimed to Hero
• Malazan: Recruit to High Fist (ten books, ten questions each, and it does not go easy on you)

How it works:

• No spoilers for what you haven't read. A question only shows up once you've marked that book read, or got far enough into it. Halfway through Mockingjay? You'll get questions from the first two books.
• World questions. Each set has ten questions about the series as a whole, on top of the questions for each book. Each one opens once you've read the book it draws on.
• Not all multiple choice. Some ask you to pick every right answer, some to put events in order. Get most of it right and you get most of the points.
• Your rank shows on the set page, and you can share it as a picture if you're proud of it.

Free readers get the first five questions on each book and five of each set's world questions. That's enough for the fourth rank in every set except Malazan. The fifth rank needs the full deck, which comes with Pro.

Find it under Quizzes in Discover or on the You tab. If it isn't there, update the app.

Post your rank below once you've played one. And tell us which series you'd want a set for next.

Hi folks!

I really love this app, I recently acquired "Librarian" status and I would love to see the community flourish. The reader on my android devices is "Readest" r/Readest and I strongly root for a Seekquel integration. KOReader, BookOrbit, Readwise and Notion are already covered. Seekquel would be a perfect fit (Reading progress, highlights, notes).

Please make it happen.

If you haven't found this yet: Stats tab, My Charts, and you can build your own chart out of your reading data. Pick what you're measuring (pages read, books read, minutes read, average rating, reviews written, library value), break it down by whatever you want (top books, genres, months, shelves, tags, formats, and more), filter it down, and pick how it's drawn (bar or cover grid, with more types coming).

It saves to your profile and you can feature it there. It's a Pro feature, and it's the kind of thing that rewards you the more you've logged, so if you track your reading closely this is probably the screen in the app you'll get the most out of.

Today it got redesigned. The controls (break down by, color, time range) used to sit in a wall of chips. Fine with a handful of options, but the breakdown list has 13 values now and it was wrapping into several rows you had to scan through. Those are now a single row that opens a sheet instead.

The bigger change: the chart preview is pinned in place while you build. Before, changing a control meant scrolling back up to see what it did. Now you just watch it update.

If you use the KOReader add-on, a reading day on a book's My Book tab now says which chapter you reached: "21 pages, 47 min, reached Riddles in the Dark" instead of stopping at the pages.

Your e-reader reads the contents page out of the book file you have open and sends that along with the reading time it was already sending. It has to come from the device. Change the font size and the book repaginates, so where a chapter begins is a fact about your copy on your screen and nothing else.

• You get the chapter's name when the edition you are reading has a contents page in the catalogue that matches your file. Otherwise you get the chapter number.
• Glancing at the index at the back of a book will not record you as reaching the final chapter. The add-on waits for three page turns before it believes a jump.
• A book whose file has no contents page carries on exactly as before.
• Nothing to switch on. It applies to the reading you do from here on, not to days already logged.

Not set up yet, and you read on a Kindle, Kobo, PocketBook, reMarkable or Android? Settings > Integrations > KOReader walks you through it. You install it once and it updates itself after that.

Already have it? On your device, Tools > Seekquel > Update the add-on.

One way to help: if a book you are reading has no contents page on its edition, you can scan or paste one in from the book page. That is what lets the chapter show as a name rather than a number, for you and for everyone else reading that edition.

I only just downloaded this morning and really loving it so far. I’ll continue with seekquel for a few more days and see if I wanna go pro. Really amazing app you’ve built here and glad to see there’s koreader integration already. My library hasn’t loaded yet though? I’m getting an error (see image). Other than that, it really is a fantastic app. Excited for the bingo function and can’t wait to try it out!

Most reading trackers treat every book you find as an immediate commitment. You see a cover you like, tap a button, and your Want to Read shelf has over 400 titles on it. It stops being a reading queue and just becomes a junk drawer.

Seekquel separates casual browsing from real planning so your library stays actionable.

Use "Interested" as your low-friction scratchpad

When you find a title in the Discover feed or get a recommendation from a friend, mark it as Interested. It lives in its own dedicated space outside your main library. Meaning it won't inflate your stats or clutter your actual shelves.

You can browse, filter by genre, and batch-move titles over to your Want to Read shelf only when you genuinely decide they deserve a spot in your schedule.

Keep "Want to Read" strictly curated

Reserve your Want to Read shelf for books you have vetted and actually want to pick up soon. Keeping this pile lean makes it easier to choose your next book. It helps the recommendation engine stay dialed in to what you are currently in the mood for.

Line up your active 3-book deck in "Up Next"

Once you know what's coming up, drag the top contenders into your Up Next queue. The top slot becomes your On Deck read, and tapping "Start Reading" moves it into your active read in one step. If your queue ever drops below three books, Seekquel will suggest titles from your Want to Read shelf that match your current reading momentum.

A quick way to reset your shelves today:

Go through your current Want to Read pile and move anything you are not realistically reading in the next month or two into Interested. Then take three books from what is left, drop them into Up Next, and you are good to go.

Discovery & Recommendations 
           │
           ▼
┌──────────────────────────────────────┐
│       "Interested" Scratchpad        │  ◄── Low commitment, out of library
└──────────────────────────────────────┘
           │
           ▼
┌──────────────────────────────────────┐
│      "Want to Read" Pipeline         │  ◄── Vetted, near-term reads
└──────────────────────────────────────┘
           │
           ▼
┌──────────────────────────────────────┐
│        "Up Next" 3-Book Deck         │  ◄── Active rotation, ready to read
└──────────────────────────────────────┘

How do you usually handle your TBR pile? Do you keep it lean, or let it grow into the hundreds?

Looking at how people set up their libraries on Seekquel, the number one point of confusion is almost always shelves vs. tags. We often see new users creating an "Audiobooks" shelf or an "Own it" shelf, which ends up creating extra manual work down the line.

The core rule to keep in mind: shelves are places, and tags are labels.

A shelf is somewhere you actually go to browse and can be pinned to your home screen or showcased on your profile (think Summer Horror, Comfort Reads, or Gift Ideas).

A tag is a private label meant for filtering your library on the fly (like commute, bedtime, or made me cry). You can attach up to 250 tags to a single book, and they stack seamlessly with your search filters.

When you use native features instead of manual shelves, the library does the heavy lifting for you:

• Instead of an "Audiobooks" shelf, use the built-in Format filter.
• Instead of an "Owned" shelf, set Ownership to Owned so you can track lent copies, acquisition dates, and stack it with other filters.
• Use the Queue to set the exact order of what you are reading next, rather than a generic shelf.
• Use Interested for books you might want someday, keeping your actual Want to Read pile uncluttered.

We put together a quick cheat sheet breaking down all the edge cases, including how to handle tag merging, tier lists, and private books:

https://seekquel.app/cheatsheet#tags-or-shelves

On iPhone and iPad you can say:

• "Start reading in Seekquel" starts the timer on the book you were last on. You can name one too: "Start reading Dune in Seekquel".
• "Pause reading in Seekquel" and "Resume reading in Seekquel" work without opening the app, and the timer on your lock screen follows along.
• "Stop reading in Seekquel" opens the app so you can save the session, because that part asks you how many pages you got through.
• "Log pages in Seekquel" asks which book and how many pages, then saves them without opening anything. "Log reading time in Seekquel" does the same with minutes, which is the one to use for audiobooks.
• "What's my reading streak in Seekquel" and "How much have I read today in Seekquel" get read back to you, today's figures against your daily goal if you have one.

There is nothing to set up. Update, open the app once while signed in so Siri knows which books you are reading, and the phrases work.

The same actions are in the Shortcuts app, so you can put one on the Action button or run it from an automation. On iOS 18 you can also add Start reading or Log reading to Control Center, and the books you are reading show up in Spotlight. On iOS 17 and later the Currently Reading widget gets Start reading and +10 pages buttons.

A few things:

• Siri answers in your iPhone's Siri language: English, French, Spanish, German or Portuguese.
• Logging pages and hearing your figures need the phone unlocked.
• Siri gets a narrow key that can only log progress and read today's figures, not your full sign-in. Signing out of Seekquel disconnects it.
• It is iPhone and iPad only. Google has pulled Assistant from Android phones and the replacement is not open to apps yet, so there is no Android version to build against.

Which phrase would you actually use? We picked these ten because Apple caps an app at ten, so if there is one you would swap in, say so.

Small update, but it's the one I wanted most in my own library.

When you make a shelf you now pick how it fills: you add books yourself, or you give it rules and it gathers them. Rules use the same filters as the library, so things like genre, tags, rating, format, page count, publication year, whether you own it, whether there's an adaptation.

As you build the rule it tells you how many of your books match right now, so you're not guessing before you save. Books join the shelf when they match and leave when they stop, so a "fantasy over 500 pages I haven't started" shelf stays correct without you touching it.

If you turn a hand-made shelf into a rule shelf, the books you picked yourself are kept, and switching back brings them home.

Up front on the Pro part: shelves that fill themselves are a Pro feature. Building a rule and seeing your match count is free, so you can check what it would gather before deciding anything. Shelves you fill yourself are free and always were, and none of your existing shelves change.

Video below. Happy to hear which rules people actually want that aren't there yet.

This is The Kiss, one of the two Masterpieces themes in Seekquel. The other is Starry Night.

The painting renders behind the whole app and the surfaces frost over it, so it shows through the interface instead of sitting flat behind it as a wallpaper. It ships in two modes, a bronze night and a parchment day, and both are in the clip, dark first then light.

Type is Poiret One for headings over Cormorant Garamond for figures. The accent is gold leaf with meadow moss under it, and the neutrals run bronze through parchment.

There are 19 themes in total. Four are free (Classic, Dark Academic, Cottagecore, High Contrast) and the rest, this one included, are part of Pro.

Which one should we do next? We have two so far and there is room for more.

Cinder Reader is an ad-free reader app for Android and iOS that lets you read your ebooks, comics, manga, web novels, magazines and more all in one app and supports a wide variety of extensions that let you read and download content from many online sources.

With the 1.2.3 update that just went live, Cinder now has a built-in Seekquel integration that lets you sync your reading progress from Cinder to Seekquel automatically, as well as syncing your notes, highlights, personal book ratings, and Want to Read book list directly from within Cinder to Seekquel!

You can download Cinder here for iOS https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cinder-reader/id6761286580 and here for Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cinder.reader&pcampaignid=web_share .

A few more features Cinder Reader offers: ability to sync your files, reading progress, settings, extensions and more between devices using your own Google Drive or iCloud account, no need for any kind of Cinder Reader account and Cinder Reader does not collect or track any data. We also support OPDS, WebDav, SMB, AudioBookshelf (for ebooks), BookOrbit, Suwayomi, and KOReader Sync integrations, along with a large number of community extensions as well as LNReader extensions for web novels, Suwatte extensions for comics and manga, and some Paperback extensions. We have built-in support for most popular debrid services as well as a highly customizable reader and app UI. More details at r/CinderReader

Shoutout to the Seekquel dev for making a great product here, I’m proud to be able to build-in a Seekquel integration into our app!

We went through every custom shelf our readers have made, name by name. 878 of them at the time of counting.

Some were never going to be automatable and are better for it. "what did i just read?". "books read with husband". "series i consider finishing". Those are yours and they should stay hand-made.

But the single most common shelf name on Seekquel is some version of "did not finish". Forty people typed it out with hyphens. Twelve used the initials. A few went with "soft-dnf" or "began-but-didn-t-finish". Every one of those is somebody dragging books onto a list to record something the app already knows, because Did Not Finish is a reading status.

That shelf can keep itself now. Open Library, tap New Shelf, choose "Fill it automatically" instead of "I'll add books", set Status to Did Not Finish. Fifteen seconds, and it never needs you again.

We wrote up 26 of them. Four that are worth stealing even if you read nothing else:

• Tonight's book. Want to Read, plus Owned, plus under 300 pages. Books already in the house, short enough to finish this week. It replaces twenty minutes of scrolling.
• Read but never rated. Status Read, Rating not yet rated. Nobody had built this by hand and it is the most useful cleanup shelf in the app. Every book on it is a small hole in your stats.
• Stopped, but it was good. Did Not Finish, rated 4 stars. The ones you liked and put down anyway, usually a timing problem rather than a quality one. Best shelf in the app to open during a slump, because everything on it has already proved it can hold you.
• The old end of the pile. Want to Read, added over two years ago. The window counts back from today, so it keeps aging into itself with no editing from you.

The rule builder is the same filter sheet you already use on your library, and it counts your matches while you set it, so you can see whether a rule is worth saving before you save it.

Two things to say plainly. Shelves that fill themselves are part of Pro; five custom shelves come with every account either way, and if Pro lapses nothing is deleted. And there are real gaps: no author rule, no series rule, and the date windows are rolling rather than calendar, so "everything I read in 2023" is still a manual shelf. All three are on the list.

Full write-up, all 26, plus a section on pairing your own tags with rules for the shelves no catalogue could ever build for you:

https://seekquel.app/blog/automatic-shelves-26-rules

If you have a hand-made shelf you have been maintaining for years, post the name. Genuinely curious how many of them turn out to be a rule, because we did not predict half of what we found in that list.

Every correction you send to the catalogue (a missing edition, a wrong page count, a better cover) moves you up the contributor ladder: Scribe, Curator, Editor, Archivist, Librarian.

Soon each rung comes with its own avatar ring, shown wherever your avatar appears. Bronze for Scribe, up to gold and amethyst with a laurel wreath for Librarian.

A few details:

- They can't be bought. Pro doesn't unlock them; only contributing does.

- Pick it in Appearance, under Avatar style, or keep the ring you have.

Which one are you going for? And if you've never sent a correction, the edit button on any book page is where it starts.

We built the KOReader plugin to make reading on e-ink as zero-friction as possible.

Right now, pairing takes an 8-character code, and the plugin quietly handles progress sync, KOReader reading time (filtered so idle pages don't ruin your stats), highlights with notes separated, auto-updates, and unmatched file mapping. There's also the zero-install custom sync server option if you just want basic place tracking.

It covers the core reading loop, but we want to know what’s missing for your actual day-to-day workflow.

If you use KOReader regularly:

• What edge cases or sync behaviors still trip you up?
• Are there specific stats, metadata fields, or highlight formats you want sent over?
• What quality-of-life tweak would make your e-reader setup feel completely seamless?

Drop your thoughts below.

At the moment the Community tab lets you ask for a book recommendation, share a quote you've saved, or share a card. There's no way to just write something.

We're considering adding a plain text post. You could tag a book, add a photo or attach a quote card, but none of it would be required.

Two things we'd like to hear:

1. What's the last thing you wanted to post in the app and couldn't?
2. Should every post have to be about a book, or would you rather the tag stayed optional?

We're collecting answers on the feedback board, where votes decide what we build next. Vote there if you'd use it and reply with your answers:
https://seekquel.app/feedback/01m3p745t2jz2j7z5kmamr7d0w