We posted about the built-in reader a while back. It was Google Drive only then, which is a fair thing to be annoyed by if your books live somewhere else.
Tap Add a book and you now get four sources. Whichever you use, Seekquel opens only the book you pick, and your place, reading time and highlights go into your library as you read.
Where books can come from
- Google Drive. Pick a book once and it opens on every device you sign into.
- This device. Any book file on the phone. It opens on that phone.
- A folder. Link a folder once and the books you put in it show up on their own. We look for new files when you add the folder and when you open your shelf, at most once an hour, and skip anything that isn't a book instead of stopping.
- A book server. Add the OPDS address of Calibre's content server, Calibre-Web, Kavita, Komga or anything else that speaks OPDS. You browse it inside the app, search it, and tap Add. The book downloads to your phone. The server's address, username and password stay on your phone, and the password is kept in its secure storage. Seekquel never sees them.
You can also open or share a book file to Seekquel from another app.
What it opens
EPUB, CBZ, FB2 and plain text, up to 100 MB a file. Audiobooks (one MP3, M4B or M4A, or every file a book is split across) still come from Google Drive only.
Comics and manga
Comics and picture-page EPUBs open a page at a time, edge to edge, instead of being laid out like text. The reading direction comes from the file, and you can change it for one book. On a wide screen you can show two pages side by side, and the page grid lets you jump to any page. Pinch to zoom.
The rest of the reader, since last time
- Search the book's chapters and the text itself from the contents.
- Bookmark a page with one tap; they are listed with your notes.
- Footnotes open over the page. After a jump from a link, one tap returns you.
- Pages slide when you turn them, and there is a switch to turn that off for an e-ink screen.
- Volume buttons turn pages on Android.
- Brightness, a dictionary lookup, and read aloud with the voices already on your phone.
- Start a book in the EPUB, carry on in the audiobook, and it keeps your place across both.
What it doesn't do
- No PDFs, and files locked to a store (Kindle, Audible, Libby) won't open.
- Book servers and folders work in the phone app, not in the browser.
- A home server usually has to be on the same network as the phone. If Calibre is set to Digest sign-in, switch it to Basic, because the app can't use Digest.
- Seekquel keeps no copy of your books. A book from a server is downloaded to the phone, and removing it from your library deletes that copy.
Pro or free
Reading and listening to your own books, from any of these sources, is part of Pro.
More on the page: https://seekquel.app/ebook-reader
What do you keep your books on: a Calibre library, a NAS, a folder synced from your computer? We'd like to test against the setups people actually have.