Tome Reader

A beautiful e-book reader for Obsidian — Tome for short. Read your EPUB library right inside your vault — and turn reading into notes: capture quotes with your thoughts and grow a vocabulary with flashcard-ready entries. Works on desktop and mobile.

Built by a humanities person who wanted her library to feel like a library.

Screenshots

Select a word → pick a dictionary → save a flashcard-ready entry	“What happened so far?” — a spoiler-safe recap built only from what you've already read
TOC panel: pinned bookmarks on top, chapter search below	Theme, font size, spacing and text color — right in the reader
Gray Fog theme on a tablet	Tuned for touch

Features

Reading

• 📚 EPUB reading in a native Obsidian tab — open any .epub from your vault
• 🎨 Four themes: Classic Light, Classic Dark, Parchment (aged paper with warm brown ink) and Gray Fog (dark academia with a crimson accent)
• 🔤 Aa panel right in the reader: switch theme, adjust font size, line spacing and even text color on the fly — without leaving the page
• ✍️ Typography controls: custom font family, size, spacing
• 📑 Table of contents panel with chapter search, current-chapter highlight and auto-scroll — works reliably even for books with a thousand chapters
• 🪄 Auto-generated TOC: if a book ships with a broken or empty table of contents (looking at you, converted web novels), Tome scans the text and builds one from the headings — cached per book. Note: books converted from PDF often lose heading markup entirely — Tome builds from whatever headings survived the conversion
• 🔖 Reading position remembered per book, chapter name and progress % in the header
• 📌 Bookmarks: drop one at the current page from the header, or pin a selected passage — they live at the top of the TOC panel, one tap to jump back. Wander around the book freely; your marked spot waits for you
• 📱 Mobile-friendly: tap zones for page turns with a subtle turn animation (respects reduced-motion), tuned for tablets and phones

Capture while you read

• 📝 Selection → book note: select a passage, add your own thought inline, and Tome saves the quote (with chapter reference) into a per-book note — created automatically
• 🈶 Selection → dictionary: select a word, type its translation right there, and it lands in your dictionary file as a spaced-repetition-ready line (word:::translation) — pairs perfectly with the Spaced Repetition plugin
• ✏️ Fix typos right in the book: select a flawed fragment, type the correction — Tome edits the EPUB file itself (only when the fragment is unique in the chapter, so nothing gets mangled)
• ⌨️ Enter to save, Esc to go back — your reading flow stays unbroken

AI assistant (bring your own key)

• ✨ Optional AI helper — plug in your own API key and Tome becomes a smart reader. Supports Groq, OpenAI, OpenRouter, Anthropic (Claude) or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint
• 🌐 Translate a selection with one tap — then send the translation straight into your dictionary
• 💡 Explain a fragment — terms, idioms, cultural references, with the surrounding paragraph as context
• 📍 “What happened so far?” — Tome collects the text before your current position and asks the model for a spoiler-safe recap; ask free-form questions about the book the same way
• 📝 Save recaps and answers into the book note with one tap — each lands as a tidy callout with the chapter and progress stamp
• 🔒 Privacy-transparent: nothing is sent anywhere unless you configure a provider and tap an AI action; only the relevant fragment (or already-read text for book questions) is sent to your provider
• 🌍 Provider geo-blocked in your region? The Base URL is editable — point it at your own relay (e.g. a tiny Cloudflare Worker that forwards requests to the API host) and keep the same key. A Test connection button in settings tells you right away if the route works

Interface

• 🌐 English and Russian UI (English by default — switch in settings)

Roadmap

• FB2 support
• Swipe page turns and page-flip animation
• Reading progress in note frontmatter (for Dataview book boards)
• Community plugin catalog submission

Install

Via BRAT (recommended for now):

1. Install and enable the BRAT plugin
2. BRAT settings → Add Beta Plugin → katrinasenpai/tome-reader
3. Enable Tome in Settings → Community plugins

From source:

npm install
npm run build

Copy manifest.json, main.js, styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/tome-reader/ and enable Tome.

Development

npm run dev            # watch mode
npm run install-vault  # build + copy into the vault set in install-vault.mjs

License

MIT