Liseur

An open-source ebook reader for Android, and a client for calibre-web, Komga, BookOrbit, liseur-sync and any OPDS catalog: EPUBs on your phone, in sync with your own book server.

The shelf, sorted by what you are currently reading.	Distraction-free page with notes and bookmarks.	Themes, open typefaces, spacing, and brightness.

_{More screenshots here}

About Liseur

Liseur renders EPUBs with the Readium engine, in open typefaces (Literata, Vollkorn, Atkinson Hyperlegible, Inter) or whatever the publisher shipped. Four reading themes: Light, Sepia, Dark, OLED Black. Margins, line spacing, brightness, and page-turn vs. continuous-scroll are adjustable per book or library-wide. Auto-scroll runs at a set pace and continues across chapter boundaries, with on-page controls to pause it, change the speed or stop.

A footer shows the page you are on, how much of the chapter is left, and time remaining. Highlights, margin notes, bookmarks, and dictionary lookups are inline; book-level notes live in the notebook. Marking a passage offers three colours, and you tick which of the six you want along with the colour new marks use. Footnotes open as a card over the page rather than sending you to the back of the book.

The library is one shelf whatever the source: local folders, calibre-web, Komga, BookOrbit, liseur-sync, or any OPDS catalog. Series are grouped into stacks tracking reading order, progress, and missing volumes. "Download all books" fills the shelf from a connected server in one go. An empty library also offers free books from Project Gutenberg: browse it by language and shelf, and download the books you want before there is anything to connect to.

Reading position syncs across devices through calibre-web, Komga, BookOrbit or liseur-sync, down to the exact sentence on the last three. BookOrbit positions travel as EPUB CFIs. A Custom connection can be an OPDS address, a kosync address, or both, so a plain catalog and a sync server that know nothing about each other still add up to a library that follows you. What each server can and cannot do is in docs/SERVER_CAPABILITIES.md.

With liseur-sync you get extras, like a per-device settings backup, and better insights of your reading progress across devices.

Two home-screen widgets show either the current book cover or your current title and progress alongside reading hours for this calendar week, month and year. Tap the title to read, or the totals to open the dashboard. Neither widget needs configuration. The former library and combined-cover widgets have been removed; their placements do not survive an upgrade.

No trackers, no analytics, no ads, no subscriptions. Liseur only talks to the servers and dictionary sources you configure. See the privacy policy.

Install

Related Projects

• liseur-sync: Lightweight self-hosted library and sync server. Watched folders, browse, download, positions and reading stats. This will give you the best "kindle/just work" experience compared to the other sync servers.
• liseur-desktop: Desktop version of Liseur (abandoned).

Development

See DEVELOPER.md for build instructions and architecture notes, and docs/SERVER_CAPABILITIES.md for what each server exposes, what Liseur implements against it, and why the gaps remain.

What's in a name?

Liseur ([li.zœʁ], lee-ZUR) is the French word for an avid reader or book lover. It sounds dignified, like the English word leisure.

Another inspiration was a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir portraying Claude Monet as "Le Liseur":

Author

Chmouel Boudjnah

• Fediverse - <@chmouel@chmouel.com>
• Twitter - <@chmouel>
• Blog - <https://blog.chmouel.com>

Licence

MIT. Bundled fonts are under the SIL Open Font License.