Reading Vault
Read EPUB and PDF books inside your Obsidian vault. Everything you highlight becomes a real note, and with Pro you can link it to your own Topic notes, so your reading ends up in the same place as the rest of your thinking.
I built Reading Vault because I wanted my books, my highlights and my notes in one place, as plain files I own. No separate app, no account, no hidden database: every book, highlight and saved word is an ordinary Markdown note in your vault.
Website: getreadingvault.app. New here? The user manual has a short page for every feature.
Reading Vault is free. Some features need a one-time Reading Vault Pro purchase ($19 founding price, $29 later). See Free and Pro below.
What it does
- A library for your books. Add EPUB and PDF files by dragging them in. Title, author and cover fill in on their own. Search, filter by status or format, browse by author, and sort books onto your own shelves.
- Add sample books. Nothing in your Library yet? One button adds four free classics (Meditations, Pride and Prejudice, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Walden), so there's something to read, highlight and listen to right away. Free for everyone.
- One reader for EPUB and PDF. Real pages, a table of contents, search inside the book, bookmarks, and it opens where you left off. Choose the font, text size, line spacing and margins, with a light, dark or automatic page.
- Highlights that become notes. Select text, pick one of five colors, add a note. Each book's own note lists its highlights, with links that jump straight back to the exact spot.
- Listen. Have the book read aloud with your computer's built-in voices, sentence by sentence, with the sentence being read underlined and the page turning as it goes. Works for PDFs too.
- Natural voices (Pro). 28 natural-sounding English voices (American and British) that sound much closer to a person reading. They're off until you switch them on, and need a one-time download of about 325 MB. After that they run on your own computer, offline.
- Audiobook mode (Pro). Turn any book into an audiobook: listening keeps going past the end of a chapter instead of stopping there, each word lights up as it's read (in EPUB books), and a sleep timer pauses it and keeps your place.
- Word lookup. Select a word for its meaning, from an English dictionary (about 5.5 MB) you download once and use offline. With Pro, "Explain in this sentence" asks your own AI service what the word means right there.
- Book summaries (Pro). A short summary on each book's page, from the book's description, your own words, or AI.
- Export highlights. Preview a book's highlights and notes as Markdown; with Pro, save them to a file or copy them.
- Full screen reading. Just the page, nothing else on screen.
- On your iPhone or iPad (Pro). Your library, books and highlights on the phone, laid out for a small screen, with the same Pro license as your computer. Listening uses the phone's own built-in voices and stops when you lock the phone. Needs iOS 17 or newer. Android isn't supported yet.
- Your files stay yours. Choose which folders it uses. Uninstall it and every note is still there, readable in Obsidian or any text editor.
Screenshots
The reader, with a highlight and the progress strip (time left in the chapter and the book):
Highlights for the book beside the page:
A book's page: cover, shelves, and every highlight with its note (summary and linked Topic are Pro):
Word lookup, from an offline dictionary:
Shelves:
Full screen reading, here with a dark page:
Listening with a natural voice (Pro): the listening bar with its three switches, the sentence being read underlined and, in EPUB books, each word lit up as it's read:
Pro: ask a question about the book you're reading, answered from your own highlights, notes and the current chapter, with numbered sources:
Pro: the reading dashboard, with goals, streaks and charts:
Pro: highlight review brings a few of your linked highlights back each day:
On an iPhone (Pro): the library, a book's page, reading, and the highlight colors.
Everything also works with a dark theme:
The books in these screenshots are public-domain books from Project Gutenberg. The notes, highlights and reading history are made up for the pictures, and the "Ask" answer shown is a written example, not a live AI reply.
Free and Pro
Payment is required for full access: the features marked Pro below unlock with a one-time Reading Vault Pro key. Everything else is free, with no time limit.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
