A free reader that answers your questions and reads aloud
Readr is an ebook reader you can talk to. You're reading Project Hail Mary and wonder: could Astrophage exist? Select the line and ask. The answer appears in the margin, drawn from the whole book, and says when it's pulling from real science instead. Lost the thread? Ask for a recap of what you've read so far, no spoilers. Press Listen and a natural voice reads from your page, on your device, no cap. Opens the EPUBs and PDFs you own. No account, no server. Free, open source. iPhone, iPad, Mac.
Hi everyone, I'm Anusree. I built Readr.
It came out of a habit I couldn't shake. I'd be reading, hit a paragraph I didn't quite follow, copy it, paste it into a chat window, type "in the book I'm reading, what does this mean," read the answer, then go back and hunt for my place. Every good reading session turned into tab management.
Readr puts the question where the book is. Open an EPUB, PDF or Markdown file you own, select a passage, ask. The answer arrives next to the passage, drawn from the whole book, with the source passages cited when it pulls them in. If you ask something the book doesn't cover, like what's changed in the field since it was written, it answers and tells you plainly which part came from outside the book. What it won't do is make up what the book says.
Press Listen and it reads to you from the page you're on, turning pages as it goes. The narrator is a neural voice (Kokoro, Apache-2.0) that runs on your device after a one-time 104 MB download. It starts speaking immediately with a system voice and switches over at the next sentence once the model is ready. Nothing about your book is sent anywhere to be read back to you. Readr Voice is for English books; other languages use Apple's voices.
Highlights and notes gather into an editable draft you can export as Markdown.
There's no account and no Readr server. For the AI, you use your own key from Anthropic, OpenAI or OpenRouter, or sign in with OpenRouter, and on a Mac you can point it at Ollama and stay offline. Keys live in the Keychain. Without a key it's still a complete reader, with narration included.
It's free and MIT-licensed. The Mac download is signed and notarized. iPhone and iPad are on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id678...
One caveat: DRM-free files only. It won't open Kindle purchases.
If you've got a book you keep meaning to finish, I'd love to hear whether this helps.
About Readr on Product Hunt
“A free reader that answers your questions and reads aloud”
Readr launched on Product Hunt on September 3rd, 2026 and earned 105 upvotes and 7 comments, placing #10 on the daily leaderboard. Readr is an ebook reader you can talk to. You're reading Project Hail Mary and wonder: could Astrophage exist? Select the line and ask. The answer appears in the margin, drawn from the whole book, and says when it's pulling from real science instead. Lost the thread? Ask for a recap of what you've read so far, no spoilers. Press Listen and a natural voice reads from your page, on your device, no cap. Opens the EPUBs and PDFs you own. No account, no server. Free, open source. iPhone, iPad, Mac.
On the analytics side, Readr competes within Open Source, Artificial Intelligence, GitHub and Books — topics that collectively have 710.5k followers on Product Hunt. The dashboard above tracks how Readr performed against the three products that launched closest to it on the same day.
Who hunted Readr?
Readr was hunted by anusree. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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