The shelf
Every story you follow, as covers or as a dense list. Stories with no cover art get a generated placeholder with their initials, which covers most AO3 works and many forum threads.
The two buttons at the top right switch between the cover grid and a dense one-row-per-story list. The list is easier on a large library and with a keyboard. Your choice is remembered.
What the badges mean
| Badge | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 2 new | Chapters that appeared since you last opened the story. |
| 7 unread | Chapters you have not read, including the new ones. |
| checking | The app is looking for new chapters right now. |
| needs attention | Something went wrong the last time it tried. The message is on the badge. |
| not downloading | You are subscribed but the download switch is off, so nothing is being kept. |
| Trial ribbon | Only the opening was downloaded, and the story is left out of update checks. See Trial read. |
| Archived ribbon | Put away. Still here, still readable, left out of update checks. |
| stale | An active story with nothing new for longer than the threshold you set. Nothing has gone wrong; plenty of serials come back. |
| on device | Saved onto this device for offline reading. Desktop and Android only. |
Edited chapters are left out of these counts by design. An edit is rare and never urgent, and the shelf is there to answer one question, which is what there is to read. The signal appears where you can act on it: on the chapter row inside the story, and in the Revised tab.
Narrowing the shelf
- The filter box matches titles and authors as you type. It is the one control here that is not remembered. A remembered search term looks like a library that has lost most of its stories.
- Sort by last updated, most unread, recently checked, title or author.
- Source appears once you follow stories from more than one site.
- The shelf. All, Active, Trials, Archived. These are three states a subscription can be in, and it can only be in one.
- Unread (n) and Stale (n) are separate toggles that narrow whichever shelf is showing, and they combine with each other. A story can be a trial and unread, or archived and stale.
Each of these controls only appears when it would leave something on screen. All of them except the search box are remembered when you leave and come back, and a remembered choice that no longer applies is dropped instead of emptying the shelf behind a control you cannot see.
Tags and collections
These are yours, and they are per profile. They do not come from the sites.
- Tags are labels. Add them from a story's own screen or its right-click menu. On the shelf they become chips beside the source filter, and choosing several narrows to stories that have all of them.
- Collections are ordered shelves for a reading order, a series, or a pile for later. Choose one from the select beside the shelf filter and the library shows that collection in the order you arranged it. Drag a row by its grip to reorder, or focus the grip and use the arrow keys.
A story's own screen
Opening a story shows its cover, author, status, word and chapter counts, tags, and a link to the original page. Below that is the synopsis, then the controls.
The action bar
Continue reading (or Start reading), Archive, Highlights & notes, and More. Behind More: the table of contents, marking new chapters as seen, refreshing now, downloading every chapter again, and unsubscribing.
Download chapters
One switch. Turning it on waits five seconds before it does anything, with the countdown and a way to cancel written underneath, because on a four-hundred-chapter thread that switch queues hundreds of requests. Flicking it back inside those five seconds sends nothing at all. Turning it off is never delayed.
Your notes
A collapsed card holding your tags for this story, its collections, a private note, and a three-state verdict of Liked, Fine or Not for me. All of it is per profile. The note saves when you click away.
The chapter list
Each row shows its number within its category, the title, when the chapter was written, its word count, and its state: NEW, UPDATED (edited since you read it), a read tick, or a spinner while it downloads. A row that has not been downloaded says so. Opening it downloads it on the spot.
Once you have read part of a story the list splits: unread on top with its count, and Read as a folded section below it. On a long story the read part is nearly always the whole screen, and it is history to go back to, not something to scroll past.
Above the list: category tabs when the story has more than one, ascending or descending order, a show deleted toggle with the count, and a jump-to-chapter box. Select turns on checkboxes for acting on several chapters at once, whether that is download, delete the downloaded text, mark read or unread, or on the desktop and Android apps save on or remove from this device.
Chapters that were deleted at the source
If a chapter disappears from the site, your copy is kept and flagged rather than removed. Opening it shows a banner naming the date it was removed and saying that you are reading the last copy that was downloaded. It still reads normally and navigation still passes through it.
Archiving and unsubscribing
These sound similar and they are not.
| Archive | Unsubscribe | |
|---|---|---|
| Downloaded chapters | Kept and readable | Kept and readable |
| Your place and your notes | Kept | Kept |
| Update checks | Stopped | Stopped |
| Downloads | Paused, and queued work cancelled | Stopped |
| Reversible? | Yes, from a panel on the story screen | Only by subscribing again |
Archive is the one to reach for. It is what a library is for. A story you have finished with for now should not keep costing requests every six hours, and it should not make the shelf noisier in proportion to how much of it you have finished.
Bringing a story back restarts the checks but deliberately not the downloads, and the panel says so. Opening a chapter of an archived story offers to bring it back, since opening a chapter is the clearest sign of renewed interest there is.
Unsubscribing asks first, and the dialog says exactly what survives.
The reading queue
The library answers “what am I following”. A story screen answers “where am I in this one”. Neither answers what should I read next, which on thirty stories is the question actually being asked.
Rows leave the list as you read them. Each group has Mark all read. The same shelf filter as the library is here, and it is remembered separately.
Extra threadmark categories never appear here. They are material to look at when you feel like it.
The Revised tab
The adjacent question: what changed in text you already read. It lists stories whose chapters were edited at the source after you read them, and opening one takes you straight to a comparison of the version you saw and the version stored now, not a list of versions to choose between.
Mark as seen dismisses an edit without inventing a re-read in your history.
The download queue
The line at the top says how many downloads run at once and where to change it. A queue that is waiting is usually waiting politely, not stuck: each site has its own pacing, and more workers do not get around it.
Work here includes fetching a chapter list, downloading a chapter, fetching a cover, checking a story for updates, and scanning your books folder.
Reading history
This is a record of what was read, not a score. A re-read is two entries, and unmarking a chapter erases neither, so nothing here changes retroactively when you correct a marker.
The per-story table sorts by when you last read each one, which answers a question no other screen does: what did I quietly stop reading. It pairs with the stale chip on the shelf.
Every bar is focusable and describes itself, and the tables below say the same things in words, so nothing here depends on being able to distinguish colours.
On a phone
The same screens reflow. The sidebar becomes a panel you open from the top left.
