Readwise Reader 4+

We built first class support for the Apple Pencil, so you can now highlight naturally (like it works in Apple Books) while reading. Many more improvements for iPads/tablets coming up soon :)

More Offline Control — Choose which categories of documents to keep available offline. Individual documents will still download automatically when you open them or view them in a list. You can control these options from the offline documents section of the Account screen.

Improved Action Sheets — Action sheets should now float nicely in the center of tablet screens, instead of at the bottom. Mati also got to the bottom of a glitch preventing highlight deletion and the action menu from working properly on PDFs. Artem fixed a glitch that caused some other action sheets not to show all their options. Arek fixed a bug where multiple bottom sheets could stay open at the same time. Using “find in document” and similar options should be easier now.

Parsing Updates — There was a regression caused by a downstream service provider of ours, which led to wonky parsing for all paywalled sites (including Substack). So Krzys made improvements to how Reader handles paywalled and translated posts, and reparsed the impacted documents. He also improved our handling for a ton of other websites.

Fixed Lock Screen — Tristan fixed an intermittent glitch with that was preventing the text to speech controls from working properly on iOS lock screens.

Improved Tablet Detection — Mati refined how we detect tablets and devices with large screens.

Fixed Button Animation — Arek restored the animation for the "Mark Seen and Next" style buttons on mobile.

Fixed Ghostreader Timeouts — AI-powered features like summaries, Chat with Highlights and Documents, and Ghostreader prompts should now be more reliable, thanks to Ibai. Fetching documents to chat with should be a lot more reliable, especially for folks with large libraries or big files.

Fixed iPad Video Margins — Mati got rid of some unnecessary black margins at the top of YouTube videos on iPad. Videos now use the full screen space available, giving you a better viewing experience without wasted vertical space.


GPT-5 Models — You can now use GPT-5 across Reader, thanks to Ibai. GPT-5 is now available in Chat with Document and Ghostreader. The default model for summaries/ghostreader is now 5-mini.

Improved Chapter Breaks — Johannes improved how ebooks handle chapter and scene breaks, so we should now properly support a wider range of ePub files.

Previously:

This build has our full ePubs v2 feature — 10x+ better performance on books, a dedicated long-form reading UI, and so much more. Our goal is to have Reader be the best app in the world for reading books (in addition to other formats), and this project is a big step towards that.

We completely rewrote the PDF Clean View feature, which allows you to read, highlight, and listen to PDFs as if they’re any other responsive document. A much cleaner and nicer way to read your PDFs, on any screen size.

E-ink mode, much faster initial document loading (for all types of documents), and much more.

iOS Custom Icons — Arek added new iOS 18 icons, enabling improved dark mode and tint mode variants for a gorgeous monochrome home screen. Navigate to Account → Change Icon to check out the options!

Better TTS Voices — Try out the new (v8 beta) voices for Text to Speech which are the most lifelike yet! These voices should now be the default in Reader if you haven't selected your own preferred voice. We also fixed crackling/distortion in the new voices.

Summaries in List View — We now display the summary and document title/favicon in the mobile actions sheet: just long press any document in a list to get a quick peak at a document's summary without having to open it.

Improved Youtube viewing — We improved the transcript tracking/autoscrolling for youtube videos, and now automatically enhance the transcripts for most videos so they're easily highlightable.