Books ​

The Books plugin adds a Books library type for your EPUB and PDF shelves, and an in-browser reader for them. Books aren't a separate section of the app — they live in the normal Library grid, with series pages, filters and search working exactly as they do for comics.

Setting up a shelf ​

Create a library of type Books (Settings → Library) and point it at a folder. The scan catalogs every .epub and .pdf it finds, reading the metadata embedded in the file: title, authors, description, ISBN, cover, and a calibre series with its position when the file carries one.

A calibre series becomes one shelf with its books in reading order; a standalone book becomes a shelf of its own. Scans are incremental — unchanged files are skipped, deleted files are pruned — and run from the schedulable Scan book libraries job.

Metadata is then enriched best-effort against the metadata service: covers, publisher, publication year, page count, and a longer description. Your file's own metadata always wins where it has an opinion; the service only fills gaps and never replaces an embedded title with a worse one. Books that don't match still work perfectly — they just keep the metadata the file came with.

Series without calibre metadata are grouped automatically where the service knows the series, so a shelf of standalone-looking files becomes a proper series in reading order. A series the file declares itself is never overridden.

Reading ​

Open any book and pick Read:

• EPUBs open an in-browser reading shell styled like the comic reader — paginated, with tap zones and arrow keys, a contents drawer, adjustable font size and line spacing, and light / sepia / dark themes.
• PDFs stream inline to the browser's own viewer.

Your position is saved per user as you read, so any device picks up where you left off, and the shelf shows read, in-progress and finished state at a glance. Mark finished and Mark unread are on the book's detail sheet.

Bookmarks ​

Save a place with the bookmark button, and the bookmarks drawer lists them for one-tap jumping. A bookmark records the exact position rather than a page number, so it reopens on the same words no matter how you've since changed the font size or resized the window. Bookmarks are per user.

Home rails ​

Two book rails — Continue reading and New books — appear on your home screen alongside the comic and audiobook rails. Hide either from its ×, or toggle them on your Profile page; the choice is saved to your account, so it follows you between devices.

On your phone and tablet ​

The BackIssue apps for Android and iPhone and iPad read your books too. Books sit in the one Library alongside comics and audiobooks — filter by medium, or let All group them under their own headers — and a book in progress joins Reading now on Home, with new books waiting under a NEW BOOK tag.

The mobile reader uses the same engine as the browser, so a position saved on one device is the exact position on every other, down to the word. It adds:

• Display — Ink, Sepia and Paper themes; Literata, a sans face, or OpenDyslexic; text size, line spacing, justification; paginated or scrolling. Saved to your device, not per book.
• Highlights and notes — select a passage and pick a colour, add a note, look a word up, find it elsewhere in the book, or share it. Highlights sync through your account, and the Highlights page for a book filters by colour or notes and exports everything as Markdown.
• Contents — with search inside the book and a resume bar; on iPad the contents open as a sidebar you can leave open while reading, and landscape reads as a two-page spread on tablets.
• Offline — download a book from its page and it reads with no server at all; positions and highlights made offline land the next time you connect.

PDFs open in a paged viewer of their own (pinch to zoom, swipe to turn), and their page is saved like an EPUB position.

The Display sheet also has a brightness slider, a true-black theme for OLED screens and a switch for page-turn animation; on Android the volume buttons can turn pages. Drag the progress bar to scrub through the book with the chapter and page under your finger. Select a word and pick Look up (Android) or Define (iOS) for a dictionary card without leaving the page. And if another device has read further since you last opened a book here, the reader says so and offers to jump there rather than moving you silently.

Read aloud (the headphones button) speaks the book with the device's own voice, one sentence at a time with the passage lit, turning pages as it goes — with previous / play / next and a speed control. The Display sheet also covers margins, body weight, a switch to keep the publisher's own fonts, keeping the screen on and locking the orientation. Tap a picture to see it full screen, and a Back pill appears after you follow a link or a search hit. Footnote references open the note in place; search hits can be stepped through from the footer; the last page offers to mark the book finished or go on to the next volume of a set; and the footer line can show the chapter, the whole book, a percentage, or nothing at all.

Adding books ​

With a Books library set up, the library's Add button gains a Books tab. Search the catalog by title, author or ISBN; each result says whether it is already on the shelf, or already wanted. Add puts the book on the wanted list and asks your download sources for it at once — by ISBN first, where the catalog knows one — and the button says what happened: downloading from which source, in the library, or wanted. A book no source has yet stays wanted: the Fill wanted books job (System → Jobs) asks again on its schedule, and a scan or import that brings the book in by other means takes it off the list. Whoever added it is notified when it lands.

GET /api/ebooks/wanted lists the wanted books and DELETE /api/ebooks/wanted/<id> drops one (the Manage library permission, like adding).

On-demand libraries ​

A source plugin can register an entire remote catalog as file-less entries: browsable books with covers and details, but nothing downloaded. The book's file is fetched the first time someone opens it and served from disk thereafter, so a very large shelf can be browsed without pulling it down first. A short "Opening…" pause on that first read is normal.

On-demand entries are best kept in their own Books library so they don't swamp the books you own. They're never counted as missing — they're there to read, just not on disk yet.

To take a source's entries off the shelf again — you removed its plugin, or you want the shelf reset — call DELETE /api/ebooks/remote/<source id> (the Manage library permission). Every file-less entry it added goes, with the series left empty; a book it had already fetched to a file stays, as an ordinary local book. The same for audiobooks: DELETE /api/audiobooks/remote/<source id>.

Elsewhere in the app ​

• OPDS serves your books to external reader apps, with downloads and covers.
• Import recognizes loose ebook files under your scan roots and files them into the Books library as Author/Series/Title.ext.
• Permission — Books library (ebooks.use, viewer tier) covers reading and downloading book files. Scanning and re-matching ride the normal library-management permission.