My Books

Turning it on

In the desktop and Android apps, My Books is already on. On a server it is off until somebody turns it on, so an existing server does not suddenly start scanning a directory nobody asked about.

Open Settings → My Books and turn on My Books. That card also holds:

• Folder. Where the files live. On the desktop app it is inside the library folder you chose. On a server it can be set here, or fixed by whoever configured the server, in which case it is shown but not editable.
• Show My Books in the sidebar. Per profile, so one person in a household having a book collection does not force the nav item on everybody else.
• How many books and how much disk they use. Each book's text is stored in a readable form alongside the original file, so a book takes roughly twice its own size. Removing it reclaims both.
• Look for new books. A rescan on demand. The folder is also rescanned every few minutes and watched for changes in between.

What it can open

A file it cannot open stays visible on the shelf with an honest reason, instead of disappearing. That matters: a book that silently vanished would look like a bug in the scanner rather than a file that needs attention.

Adding books

Two routes, and they end up in the same place.

1. Upload. The button on the My Books screen opens your file picker, or drag files from your desktop onto the grid. Files land in whichever folder you are currently browsing.
2. Copy them in. Put files directly into the books folder with your file manager. The app notices, usually within a few minutes; Rescan makes it look now.

A file added either way is indistinguishable afterwards. Which is the point: you can keep managing the folder yourself if you prefer.

A book's identity is the contents of the file, not where it is. Moving or renaming it keeps your reading position, your highlights and your tags.

The shelf

What is missing here compared with the library, and why:

• No download progress. The file is already here. There is no such thing as a partly downloaded book.
• Nothing to check. A book has no upstream that could change, so there is no new or updated badge, no last-checked line and no refresh button.
• A format chip instead of a source chip, plus the series where the file names one.

Reading progress, continue reading, covers, sorting and filtering all work exactly as they do on the library shelf.

Folders

Folders are real folders on disk, shown as tiles above the book grid with a breadcrumb above them. Click a folder to go in; Up and the breadcrumb both come back out. Show all books flattens the whole tree, which is the answer to “where did I put it”.

• New folder creates the directory immediately.
• Rename renames it on disk. Nothing is re-imported and no reading position is lost.
• Move works three ways: drag a card onto a folder tile or a breadcrumb, select several cards and use Move to…, or use Move to… in a card's own menu. Drag is a convenience; the other two work with a keyboard and with a screen reader.
• Delete a folder that is empty and it goes. Delete one with books in it and you are asked, with move the books to the parent folder as the default answer. Deleting the books as well needs a second confirmation.

When a filter is active, folders that contain matches are highlighted with a count covering everything below them, so a match three levels down lights up the folder that leads to it.

Search, filters and tags

The search box covers title, author, series and tags. Beside it: author, series, language, format, and reading state, which is unread, in progress or finished.

Tags come from two places and are shown differently. Parsed tags came out of the file itself and cannot be edited, because editing them would imply writing back into your EPUB, which Fiction Reader does not do. Your own tags are added from the book's screen or its menu, and can be included or excluded in the filter.

Reading a book

For everything except PDFs, nothing changes: the chapters open in the same reading view, with the same typography controls, the same progress model, the same highlights and notes, and the same keyboard shortcuts. See Reading.

PDFs open in their own view, because typography controls do nothing to a fixed page layout. Instead you get zoom, fit-width and fit-page, and a page jump. The document's outline becomes the chapter list, so “jump to chapter” and “continue where I left off” behave the way they do everywhere else. A PDF with no outline is divided into page ranges.

Deleting downloaded text after reading never applies to your own books. A book is an all-or-nothing file you own, and throwing away one parsed chapter would be both misleading and unrecoverable short of importing the whole file again.

Removing a book

There is no “remove from the app but leave the file”, because the file would reappear at the next scan and that reads as a bug.

• Remove moves the file into a trash folder inside your books folder, keeping its position in the tree, and takes the book off the shelf. Your reading progress is kept while it is in the trash, so an accidental removal costs nothing.
• Delete permanently is a second, separately confirmed action in the trash list.
• The trash empties itself after 30 days by default, and its size is shown in Settings.

Restoring from the trash, or simply putting the same file back in the folder, brings the book back, including on your other devices if you use sync.

What it will not do

• It does not remove DRM, and it does not try.
• It does not write back into your files. Metadata you edit lives in Fiction Reader's own records.
• It does not fetch anything from the internet for a book you imported.