What's New

Notes that save as you write

• Notes save as you write. There is no Save or Cancel any more: changes are kept as you type, and closing a note offers an Undo in case you did not mean it. In landscape the note opens as a tab in the study rail, beside the text rather than over it, so you can keep paging the book or check your other gems without losing the draft. Picking a colour recolours the highlight as you watch
• Back up your library as a plain ZIP — your book files under their original names, ready to open in any other reader. It sits beside the Strong and Standard GemPack choices and carries the books only; highlights, notes and reading positions stay in GemPack
• Links inside a footnote work. A note that says “see chapter 4” now jumps there when tapped instead of showing the link as plain text, and a long footnote card expands to most of the screen
• A .gempack link on gemreader.com opens straight in GemReader and imports, asking for the PIN if the pack has one
• A PDF highlight with a note shows a small note mark beside it, as it does in an ebook, and highlights across justified text end in a straight edge
• Fixed: answers typed into a fillable PDF form being lost on the next page turn; a PDF going blank, or flashing white in dark mode, after a tap, a zoom or a page turn; a PDF note in your gems opening on an empty page; and scroll mode skipping past chapters instead of turning to the next one

Highlight PDFs, and comics get a page counter and scrubber

• Highlight PDFs. Press and hold on a word to start selecting, lift, and the passage is marked in your last-used colour — or underlined, if you prefer. A mark takes a note the way a highlight in an ebook does, and it is a gem like any other: it shows in your gems list labelled with its page, and goes into your Markdown and Anki exports with that page as its locator. The PDF itself is never rewritten
• Comics show which page you are on, as a number out of the total rather than a percentage, and the toolbar has a scrubber for jumping across an issue. The pages either side of the one you are reading are unpacked ahead of time, so a page turn no longer waits on the archive. Tapping a page now turns it from the edges and brings the toolbar back from the middle, and a manga marked right-to-left in its ComicInfo file turns the way it reads
• Free books has two shelves from the Digital Library of India: Hindi and Arabic, some twenty thousand scans from before 1950, sorted so the best-known names come first. Until now every built-in catalogue but Gutenberg’s three Hindi titles was in a Latin script
• Dark mode can leave a PDF’s colours alone. Inverting a page is right for black text on white and wrong for a scan, a plate, a chart or a map, where the inverse reads as a photographic negative. The PDF settings sheet has a switch for it, and it holds for every PDF rather than per book
• Send a library backup over Gem Beam. The password step of a GemPack backup now offers to beam the finished pack straight to another phone, alongside saving and sharing it, and a strong backup password travels with it. The password itself is shown and typed in a monospace face, so I, l and 1, or O and 0, cannot be mistaken for each other
• On a phone with the Play Store set to download over Wi-Fi only, the extra font pack for scripts the built-in fonts do not cover sat waiting forever. The app now asks Play to raise its mobile-data sheet the first time you open a book, and stops asking if you decline
• Fixed: form answers typed in one chapter of a workbook showing up in the same field in every other chapter; the Deleted snackbar with its Undo staying on screen forever; a turning page being cut off fifty pixels inside the margin while the paper ran to the edge; several copies of GemReader piling up in Recents when opening files from a file manager; glide typing not working when naming a book or a collection; and sheets sitting off centre in split view on a tablet

Comics open in the same reader as your books: import a .cbz, or pull one from two curated archive.org collections

• Comic archives read. Import a .cbz the way you would any other book and it opens in the reader, a page at a time, with pinch to zoom and the page turns you already use. Pages come in numeric order, so an archive that names them 1, 2 and 10 reads in that order rather than 1, 10, 2 — which is how most scans are named and how most readers get them wrong. Where the archive carries a ComicInfo file, the series and issue number become the title and the writer becomes the author, and a book marked as right-to-left manga turns its pages that way. The controls that need words — search, read-aloud, text size, spacing and fonts — are not offered for a comic, because there is nothing for them to act on
• Free books carries comics as well as ebooks now. Two hand-checked archive.org collections of Golden Age comics in the public domain sit in a comics section of their own, and an issue downloads onto the shelf the same way an ebook does. The catalog list is grouped by what a source holds, so a comics feed is not a row lost among the ebook ones
• The Import button could ignore the first tap after the app started. On a phone with three-button navigation the menu it opens was already listening for touches while it was still invisible, for about a sixth of a second, so the tap that opened it was swallowed — and the impatient second tap landed on the menu’s own dismiss layer, closing what it was trying to open
• Highlights in study publications sat away from the words they were drawn for at every text size except the default, and further away the further the size was from it. Those books set their text size by zooming the page, and the zoom was being counted twice
• A highlight could have a bite taken out of it by a link that belongs to a different paragraph, on pages that put a link in every paragraph. Highlights leave links uncovered on purpose, and the search for links to leave alone now stays inside the paragraph being drawn

Gestures where there used to be menus, and Undo where there used to be a confirmation dialog

• Swipe a book sideways on the shelf to favourite it or to delete it. Both were reachable only by holding the book down and picking from a menu — for the two things people do to a book most often
• Deleting a book now just deletes it, and offers you Undo for seven seconds afterwards, instead of stopping you with a question first. Nothing is destroyed while that offer stands: the book leaves the shelf immediately, but every byte it owns stays on disk until the offer runs out, so Undo puts it back exactly where it was. Deleting a collection still asks, because that one is a real question with three answers
• Rate a review card by throwing it: left for Again, right for Good, on distance or on a flick. The three buttons are still there and still the complete set
• Pull the library down to refresh it, and tap the tab you are already on to go back to the top of a long list. The Import button also steps out of the way while you scroll down, and comes back the moment you scroll up
• The app has one vocabulary of haptic feedback now, and a switch to turn it off, under Settings. Seven cues that mean different things — a selection, a press, something committed, something that failed — rather than the same buzz for "I heard you" and "that’s done". Several places that should have answered your finger and never did now do
• Waits show the shape of what is coming instead of a spinner over empty ground. The library draws its grid at the exact size the cards will be, so nothing moves when the books land, and the gems scan shows a bar that fills rather than a circle that spins while holding the numbers that say how far along it is
• Going into a collection, or into a feed under Free books, now travels: forward arrives from one side, back from the other, so the app says which way you went. The library’s action sheets slide up from the bottom edge and can be flung away, like every other sheet in the app
• On a tablet, single-column lists of text — your gems, the shelf in list view, a book feed — are held to a reading measure instead of running the full width of the glass. The grid is deliberately not capped: cards tile, and extra width there buys more of them
• The chapter-summary model can be deleted. Trying summaries once left 2.6 GB of weights and around 800 MB of compiled files on the phone, with no way to remove them short of clearing the app’s data, which takes your library with it. Settings → Advanced now names what is on disk and removes it
• Immersive reading ended by itself. Leaving the app and coming back showed the status and navigation bars again, and nothing hid them a second time
• Chapter summaries could come back as one word repeated for whole pages, or as nonsense mixing scripts, on some phones. The check for a corrupted result looked only for a specific broken symbol, so output that was structurally garbage but made of real words passed as clean. It is now caught by its shape, and the offer to fall back to the slower processor is reachable from the state that needs it
• A book’s cover could be lost when moving it between a locked folder and an unlocked one, if either half of the move failed. The book kept a note that it owned a cover at a path holding nothing

Navigation you can reach with a thumb, and a Material Design 3 rebuild around it

• The three parts of the app — your library, your gems and your review deck — now live in a bar along the bottom of the screen, where a thumb can reach them. They used to be icons in the top-right corner, which on a phone is the one place a hand cannot go. The bar still carries the count of cards waiting to be reviewed, and moving between the three fades rather than cutting
• Importing a book has a button of its own now, sitting above that bar. It opens the same menu of ways to bring a book in as before, stacked upward from the button
• On a tablet, or in a wide enough half of a split screen, the navigation moves to a rail down the side rather than stretching three buttons across the width of the screen. Sheets, the search bar and messages are held to a readable width there too, instead of a theme picker running thirteen inches across
• Two more free catalogs to browse under Free books: Palace Bookshelf, and Ebooks libres et gratuits for French
• The app’s furniture — its type, spacing, colours, buttons, sheets and dialogs — has been rebuilt on Material Design 3, so GemReader looks and answers like an Android app rather than a desktop one squeezed onto a phone. Buttons and rows ripple from the point you touched, and sheets can be dragged down and flung away by their handle instead of Back being the only way out. The page you read is deliberately untouched: Paper, Parchment, Velvet, Royal and Chalk are still the materials a book is printed on
• Text throughout the app is larger. Most of it had been set a full step below the size Android itself uses for body text, which is small enough to be work to read
• The library header carried seven buttons; it now carries one. History, settings and split view moved into a sheet behind it, and selecting books still brings up its own bar of actions
• Covers saved before GemReader stored them as thumbnails are re-encoded at thumbnail size, which gives back the space the full publisher artwork was taking. It happens quietly in the background, and for a locked folder when you next unlock it
• Covers could go blank for books that had been in a folder you locked and unlocked again — the picture was being decrypted with a key the folder no longer used, which held up until it was dropped from memory and asked for a second time

The highlight magnifier lands on the words in study publications, and tapping a tag you have used before now applies it.

• The magnifier shown while you highlight was in the wrong place in study publications, which are laid out at a page zoom rather than at a text size. Both the window and the line inside it were positioned as though the page were unzoomed, so the further down the page you read the further the magnifier sat from your finger, until it showed blank paper instead of words. Everything it draws is now measured against the zoom the page is really rendered at
• Tapping a tag you had already used did nothing. The list of your existing tags is drawn above the field it belongs to, and on Android that put it outside the area answering a tap, so an existing tag could only be applied by typing it out in full. The list now sits inside the field's own hit area, and a tap fills the tag in and applies it

A magnifier that no longer goes blank at a page break

• The magnifier shown while you highlight was blank on the first and last line of a page. A paragraph that carries over from one page to the next is one paragraph as far as the reader is concerned, and the magnifier was looking for it a page's width from where it was drawn — so it showed empty paper instead of the words under your finger. It now finds the line wherever the page break left it, and shows the line it continues from above it
• Everywhere else, the magnified line sat a hair off the words it was magnifying, by the width of the magnifier's own border. It sits on them now

Highlights that no longer hold the page still

• Highlights and notes were a patch of page you could not scroll from. In continuous scrolling, putting a finger on one and dragging held the page still instead of moving it, so a long note in the middle of a chapter blocked the way past. Dragging from a highlight now scrolls the page as anywhere else does, and a tap still opens it
• The magnifier shown while you highlight put the wrong text under your finger on any phone whose own text size is set larger or smaller than normal. The line inside it was sized twice over, which pushed it sideways and left it sitting below the words it was magnifying. It now follows your finger whatever that setting is
• The magnifier could also show a line above or below the one being highlighted, whenever a selection started or ended where a line wraps, and could drift off the text as the page settled underneath it

Fan a book out into cards — and dictionaries for nine languages

• PageFlow: pinch a page and the book fans out into cards. The page you are on sits in the middle, its neighbours peek in from either edge, and you travel by dragging, by tapping a peek, or with the slider along the bottom. Tap the middle card to stay where you have landed, or press back and you are returned to the exact page you left
• Dictionaries for English, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and Russian, downloaded from inside the app. Each one tells you its size and where it came from before you start, works offline once it has landed, and can be deleted whenever you want
• Looking a word up now searches every dictionary you have installed, instead of reaching for English whenever a book does not say what language it is in. PDFs never say, so a Spanish or Korean dictionary was being passed over on exactly the books that needed it most
• PDFs can be navigated: a contents list built from the document's own outline, a page slider in the bottom bar, and a keypad for typing a page number or stepping ten at a time. Turning a page is animated rather than a hard cut
• Importing a book opens the file picker at your Documents folder, rather than wherever the phone last left it. After that it opens where you last took a file from — and saving a Gem Pack to a folder counts, so the next import starts there
• GemReader now speaks Turkish, Vietnamese and Thai
• Highlighting takes hold the moment you press, rather than half a second later. The word under your finger is marked while the finger is still down, dragging extends the selection as you go, and lifting your finger keeps exactly what was shown
• Scanning a QR code has never worked. The permission the camera needs was never declared, so the system refused it whatever you chose in the dialogue, which put Gem Beam pairing and password import out of reach. Both work now
• Buttons in the reader bars, the PDF bars and the library header were smaller to hit than they looked. The bars are unchanged; the area that answers your finger is bigger, and the icon-only buttons now say what they are to a screen reader
• The definition card no longer scrolls its own headword and buttons out of sight on a long entry, and a long quote shared as a card is no longer clipped on its last line
• The English dictionary is no longer built into the app; it is the first entry on the Dictionaries screen instead. The download is about 8 MB smaller as a result, and readers who do not want an English dictionary can now delete the one they were given
• GemReader now needs Android 10 or newer. Phones on Android 7, 8 and 9 keep the copy they already have and it goes on working, but they will not receive further updates. Those versions no longer get security fixes from Google, and we cannot test the reader on them well enough to promise it works

Books that would not open on older phones, now open

• Some phones ship a built-in browser engine that stopped being updated years ago, and on those, certain books would not open at all. The reader now brings the pieces those engines are missing rather than assuming they are there
• Gem Packs now carry bookmarks, reading positions and saved form answers as well as the highlights and notes they already held, so a book restored from a pack opens where you left it instead of at the first page
• When something goes wrong, the security screen can now build a diagnostics report and hand it to you to send on. It carries what the phone is, how the encryption self-test performed and the recent errors — and nothing about what you read: book titles, filenames, keys, notes, and collection names are stripped out before the file is written
• Highlights and notes restored from a Gem Pack never appeared for books that landed inside a collection. Nothing was lost — the gems were written in the wrong wrapping — and they come back on their own the next time you open the book, with no need to import the pack again
• GemReader no longer puts itself forward for every file on the phone. It had been offering to open emails, plain text and anything else at all, and a file it could not read got as far as an import dialogue before giving up. It now claims only the formats it can actually read, and checks what a file really is before treating it as a book

Voices that tell you what you're getting, and one Gems filter everywhere

• The read-aloud voice picker now tells you what you are getting before you pick: which engine is built into the phone and needs no download, and what quality to expect from each voice, instead of a bare list of names
• The filter that narrows Gems down to highlights, notes, image notes or saved answers is now the same control whether you open Gems for your whole library or for the book you are reading, rather than two that looked and behaved differently
• Deleting several books at once now closes the selection sheet instead of leaving it open over a list that no longer holds what it was pointing at
• The selection menu no longer keeps offering actions for a book you just deleted
• Searching a book catalog can be cleared in one tap; the search box had no way back to the full list short of deleting what you typed

A crash while the extra fonts unpacked, fixed

• A crash that closed the app while the extra fonts were being unpacked, on Android 14 and newer. The unpacking runs as a background job the app was no longer allowed to start, and being refused took the app down with it. Nothing was lost, and any book open at the time reopens where you left it

Hand your books to the phone next to you

• Gem Beam: hand a whole collection to the phone next to you. The sender shows one code, the receiver scans it with the camera, and the books cross directly between the two devices over their own private Wi-Fi link — no internet, no account, no cloud, nothing about your library leaving the room. Large collections land in seconds rather than hours, and a beam interrupted halfway through picks up where it stopped instead of starting again
• What you beam is the whole collection, not just the files: covers, reading position, highlights, notes and study progress travel with the books, so the collection opens on the other phone in the state you left it in. Everything is packed and encrypted before it is sent, and the receiver sees what is being offered — and a reminder that the description comes from the sender — before accepting anything
• Receiving lives in the add menu in the library header, beside importing and browsing catalogs. Sending is on a collection, on a book, and on a multi-select, so you can beam what you have in your hand
• The launch animation, the app-lock screen and the study session's countdown now run their motion off the UI thread, so the sparkle, the lamp and the paper texture stay smooth on modest phones instead of stuttering while the app is still waking up

Every highlight in one place — and free books to fill the shelf

• Gems now has a library-wide view: every highlight, note, image note and saved form answer from every book in one searchable list, grouped by book, one tap from the library header. Tapping a gem opens the book at exactly that place. Books inside a locked collection are counted rather than quietly left out, and join the list the moment you unlock it
• Tags on highlights and notes. Label a gem with why you kept it, then filter by tag, group by tag, or find it by typing the tag into search. Markdown export writes them as #hashtags, the form Obsidian and Notion already index, and Anki export carries them in the Tags column beside the book and chapter
• Your own names for the highlight colours, kept per book. Call yellow "Definition" and pink "For the exam", and the colour filter, the study rail and every gem row say so instead of naming a colour
• A catalog of free books, inside the app. Browse or search Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks and Wolne Lektury from the library header and download a book straight into your library — or add any HTTPS catalog you trust. Downloaded books are encrypted on arrival exactly like the ones you import yourself, and nothing is sent about you to get them
• Adding to your library is one button now. Importing books and making a collection share a single menu in the library header instead of two icons competing for the same corner
• Reading in scroll mode: the top of a chapter could not be scrolled to, taps on a link or on a chapter in the contents landed short of where they pointed, and note markers were drawn away from the text they belong to. Worst the first time a study book was opened

Crisper highlights, and study publications that read in the dark

• Highlights are painted by the page itself instead of by a layer above it: the text under a highlight stays as crisp as the rest of the page, and a highlight inside a tinted box or a table cell is no longer swallowed by it
• Headings and coloured text in study publications are readable on dark themes again. The publisher's near-black and deep-toned headings kept their printed colour on a dark page; they are now lifted just far enough to be read, and keep their hue. Tinted panels are left exactly as printed
• Footnotes in study publications no longer open empty in Korean and in every other non-English edition, where the reference and the note text share one paragraph
• Locked collections are now recognised by an identity of their own rather than by their name, so renaming or moving one can no longer put its books out of reach — and a locked collection can be renamed while it is unlocked, instead of the rename option being hidden for good
• Importing works again after you leave the file picker to open a book from a file manager. The picker never reported back, so every later import failed until the app was restarted
• A book's language is detected again when the book declares more than one, or leads with a blank or placeholder tag — page turns, word selection and text-to-speech all read from it
• App Lock no longer wipes the system clipboard. Copying a password out of GemBox to save it in your password manager used to leave you with nothing to paste
• The status and navigation bars follow the theme you pick from inside a sheet or dialog, instead of staying on the previous one until the sheet closes
• The mini audio player now fills the bottom edge of the screen rather than floating above the gesture bar

Hindi, Portuguese and Indonesian

• The app now speaks Hindi, Portuguese and Indonesian, bringing it to fifteen languages — pick yours in Settings, or let it follow the one your phone is set to
• Launch tips, trivia, and literary quotes in Gemformation are now available in Hindi, Portuguese, and Indonesian
• Text in Hindi, Khmer, Burmese and Amharic no longer has its marks and accents clipped in dialogs and at the top of the library
• A book downloaded from a Gem List opens again. It was stored under a name it had not been sealed with, so every single-book download arrived unreadable
• Books moved out of a locked collection, or left behind when the collection they were in was emptied, are now found and repaired the first time this version starts — the earlier recovery pass could not see them
• Replacing a book you already have while extracting an archive no longer leaves the replacement unreadable
• Moving a book to another storage volume can no longer leave a half-written file behind if the copy is interrupted; the move either completes or leaves the book where it was

Locked collections no longer lock you out of your books

• Books that were already in a collection when you locked it can be opened again. Locking a collection re-sealed those books under a name they no longer had, so afterwards every one of them reported formatting errors and the offer to repair could not help
• Your affected books are recovered the first time this version starts, and books inside a locked collection the first time you unlock it. Nothing was lost and nothing needs re-importing
• Moving a book into or out of a locked collection no longer leaves it unreadable
• Removing a collection's lock and then setting a new one no longer fails partway through

A quieter Gems header, and more room for what you wrote

• The Gems header no longer spends a line on labels: highlights, notes, image notes and form contents are icon buttons that say what they will do when you hold them, and a toast confirms what you just turned on or off
• The buttons in the Gems header now spread across the full width of the row, so each one is an easier target and the header sits in less space
• A gem's row gives more of itself to the note and less to its furniture, so more of what you wrote is readable without opening it
• The search boxes in Gems and in the chapter list no longer trail an ellipsis in their placeholder
• The hint that points at the import button on first launch is now a tooltip anchored to the button itself rather than a banner above the library, so it points where you need to tap and leaves with the first tap
• Adding a note to a highlight keeps the colour you gave that highlight instead of resetting it to the default

Out of open beta — and backups are fast now, with no 2 GB cap.

Backups made by 1.23.0 cannot be opened by older versions. Update both devices before sending a backup across.

• GemReader has left open testing. It is now a full production release on Google Play — no beta to join, and it shows up in search and on any device. The direct download is unchanged, and both are still the same app from the same signing key.
• Backing up your library runs about seven times faster, and restoring one about eleven times faster — what took most of a minute now finishes in seconds.
• A backup can be as large as your library and your free space allow. The old 2 GB limit on restoring one is gone.
• Locking a backup with a long PIN or passphrase no longer makes you sit through the slow key stretching a short one needs.
• Every book, cover and media file is sealed with its own key, tied to the file it belongs to — a file swapped in from elsewhere on the device no longer decrypts.
• Your library moves to that stronger layout on its own, in the background, the first time this version opens it.

Lock-screen audio controls, hardware-accelerated encryption, and a highlight toolbar that stays out of your way.

• The Android encryption engine is checked against the official NIST test vectors before it is used, and refuses to run at all if any check fails, rather than quietly falling back
• The random number generator used for encryption keys is health-checked on startup, so a device with a broken one is caught instead of trusted
• Chapter audio and read-aloud now appear in the notification shade and on the lock screen, with the book's cover art, and answer to headphone, watch and Bluetooth buttons
• Playback speed from 0.5x to 2x now keeps voices at their natural pitch instead of making them squeaky or deep
• Tapping a note you already wrote opens it to read first — formatted text, more of the quote, and Edit one tap away — instead of dropping you into the editor behind the keyboard
• Settings now carries a security check that reports which encryption engine your device is using and whether it passed its self-tests
• Encryption runs on your device's hardware AES instructions where they exist, so opening books, importing them and loading covers all take less time
• The Gems header is readable now: filter chips are labelled and carry counts, and sorting and scope say what they are set to rather than relying on a toast
• The audio scrubber updates more often, so the position it shows keeps up with what you are hearing
• The app asks for fewer Android permissions — the unused photo and download ones are gone
• The highlight toolbar no longer covers the passage it is colouring — it sits below the selection, or above it when there is no room below
• The colour you tap in a swatch is now the colour that lands on the page
• Bottom sheets and menus no longer sit partly under the Android navigation bar, so their last row is tappable again
• Closing a note with unsaved edits now asks before discarding them, whether you tap the backdrop, press back, or hit Cancel
• Audio pauses for calls and other interruptions and picks up again afterwards, instead of playing on underneath or staying stopped
• Starting read-aloud now stops chapter audio and clears its lock-screen controls, instead of leaving both playing over each other

PDFs get a reader of their own

• PDFs now open in a reader built for them: a page counter, page arrows, and a settings sheet that only carries what a PDF can actually use — no more EPUB-only controls sitting there doing nothing
• The app now runs on a newer Android foundation (Expo SDK 57 / React Native 0.86)
• PDF: pinch-zoom no longer stutters, the page count is right, and the control bar stays hidden instead of popping back on its own
• Highlighting: the highlight now lands on the words you watched settle, rather than a slightly different span
• Notes: note boxes and their highlights resize with the text after a rotation or a split-view toggle, instead of clipping or sitting over the wrong line
• Split-pane: jumping from chapters, gems or bookmarks no longer flashes the chapter you came from
• Landscape: the top bar no longer drifts or shifts the study rail while a rail panel is open
• Collections: restoring a backup into a nested collection now shows the parent folders too, instead of leaving the subfolder stranded

GemPack backups now move freely between the Play Store and direct-download builds.

• Importing a large book now checks free space first and warns you before it runs out
• Backing up a collection tells you which books had their embedded video or audio left out, instead of silently dropping it
• A backup made by a newer version of the app now says so, instead of failing with a generic error
• Moving a book with embedded video or audio into or out of a locked collection now re-locks that media to match, so it is always sealed with the collection it lives in
• GemPack backups made in the Play Store build can now be restored in the direct-download build, and the other way round — the PIN was being rejected even when it was correct
• Highlights and notes can be tapped again after turning the page
• Split-pane: notes added from the dictionary now show their margin icon straight away
• Note icons no longer sit on top of the last word of a line
• Footnote, scripture and definition popups now fade out instead of disappearing on the spot
• The Android navigation bar icons follow the app theme instead of the system one
• Time left in the chapter no longer carries over from the book you read before
• Split-pane: the chapters, gems and bookmarks panels no longer flip back to the previous one on their own

Your shelf is nobody else's business.

• Book covers are now encrypted at rest, with the same AES-256-GCM container your books already use — and inside a locked collection, with that folder's key. Cover art gives away what a library holds, so it no longer sits on disk as ordinary image files.
• Covers decrypt on demand as you scroll, so the library is exactly as fast as it was before.
• Selecting books puts the bulk actions straight in the header, instead of behind a second tap.
• The language list in Settings stays collapsed until you open it, so the menu no longer spills onto two lines.
• Fixed: collections spanning the wrong width on widescreen and tablet layouts, covers coming up blank on the home screen after a cold start, and pinching to switch between grid and compact view being missed.

Nothing left in the clear.

• Importing and exporting no longer leaves plaintext on disk — every temporary file is encrypted while it is being worked on, and the scratch space is overwritten and deleted when the job ends, when you lock the app, and at startup.
• Nested folders inside collections can now be renamed.
• GemPack folder backups now sweep in every subfolder beneath the folder you picked.
• Archive imports take up to 200 books at a time, up from 50.
• Moving a book is easier — the folder list scrolls, and nested folders start collapsed instead of flooding the screen.
• "Uncategorized" is now called "Homepage", and the locked-collection, add-folder and add-book icons have been refreshed.
• Fixed: highlight and note icons flickering in split-pane, chapters rendering compressed at the top of the page in split-pane, and out-of-memory crashes when importing or exporting large archives.

Two books, one screen.

• Split-pane reading — open two panes side by side, each with its own gestures, immersive mode intact and no stutter.
• GemPacks can now be encrypted when you export them, and audio files ride along in the backup.
• PIN entry uses an in-app keypad instead of the system keyboard, and screenshot blocking now covers PIN screens too.
• Favorites now include books tucked inside subfolders.
• Reader refinements — better font and text resizing controls, and focus mode dims paragraphs by color instead of opacity so text stays crisp.
• Library page tightened up: less white space, centered header, and collections that span the grid correctly.
• New Velvet and Parchment theme tweaks, plus a refined search field and export screens.
• GemPacks hardened after an adversarial security audit.
• Fixed: filename normalization breaking imports, book open/close animation landing in the wrong spot, a blank frame when sliding between images, image swiping breaking zoom and pan, missing Gem Lists, reading-position tracking inside books, the back button regression from the Android 16 update, the password screen vanishing after saving a GemPack, audio gaps in GemPacks, annotation taps in paged flow, note glyph margins, toolbar jitter, and a startup warning.

Dark mode, mid-chapter.

• Switch between dark and light directly in the reader, with a compact text settings panel a tap away.
• Swipe between images in the same chapter, save or share any image, and copy its alt text.
• PDFs now support in-book search and dark-mode pages.
• Now targets Android 16 (API 36) for Play Store policy — minimum supported version stays at Android 7.0.
• The window-size limit is gone, so large tablets get the full canvas, and quote-card sharing looks right on big screens.
• Gem List sort buttons and default sorting reworked, and PIN security for locked collections hardened.
• Fixed: pressing back rapidly exiting a book early, sample books always coming back, importing via "Open with", the study rail closing when nav bars faded, PDF zoom gesture arbitration and selection ghosting, audio jump-back skipping 15 seconds instead of 10, and EPUB sanitizing writing the mimetype entry incorrectly.

Read PDFs. Listen to your library.

Versions 1.14 and 1.15 were built but never shipped — everything planned for them is included here.

• PDF support — fixed-layout rendering with forms, links, pinch-to-zoom, in-document search, and dark mode.
• Text-to-speech narration — listen to your books, attach custom audio per chapter, and control playback from the lock screen.
• Spaced-repetition review — turn your highlights and notes into a study deck on a dedicated Review page, with Anki (.apkg/.txt) deck import.
• A built-in dictionary — look up word definitions without ever leaving the page.
• GemList downloads — fetch and import books straight from the internet, with gem-type filters now multi-select and further Gem List improvements.
• Share an excerpt as a quote-card image, and attach notes directly to images inside a book.
• Add bookmarks straight from the in-app browser, and open GemPack declarations from anywhere in the app.
• New in-brand toast notifications replace the system style, and Markdown rendering in annotation notes is faster and more reliable.
• New "Ultra" theme variants, with better contrast and dark-mode-aware cover and collection colors.
• Library page refinements — improved list view, a fixed hide-cover bug, and a smoother close-book animation.
• Reader margins trimmed, links and dark text now render correctly inside highlights, and locked collections got a UI polish.
• Fixed duplicate books being deleted across folders, a table-of-contents jump regression, EPUB sharing with unusual filenames, images that could be dragged off-screen after zooming, and books incorrectly flagged as GemPacks during import.

Retrace your steps. Study your gems.

• Reading history — step back and forward through the places you've visited inside a book, like a browser's back button.
• Share GemPacks as scannable QR codes — export and import your annotation packs without sending a file.
• Export your highlights and notes as Anki flashcards for spaced-repetition study.
• JUMBO EPUB import — bring in very large books up to 200 MB.
• Split-screen and multi-window support for reading alongside other apps.
• Library search now shows book thumbnails, including books tucked inside collections.
• More reliable imports — if a transfer gets interrupted, it picks up where it left off and double-checks the book came through intact.
• Fixed the black screen on import, and a cleanup bug that could remove books it shouldn't have.

Welcome to GemReader. Gems stay in sync.

• A new welcome screen on first launch — rotating book quotes and trivia in English and Spanish, with smooth shimmer animations and dark/light theme support.
• Change the app's language directly from your Android system settings (System → Language & region → App languages).
• Collection and folder colors are now part of the theme system, giving your library a unified look that respects your theme choice.
• Copy and search no longer leave stray highlights behind.
• Changing a highlight's color now preserves any notes attached to it.
• Gems list now handles edits and deletes correctly — no more duplicate or disappearing annotations.

Smoother page turns. Faster gestures.

• Book open and close animations now use a sliding transition with a white-flash fix for smoother visual polish.
• Pull-to-refresh gesture refined — activation zone narrowed to the top 15% of the screen for more intentional triggering.
• Fixed external storage migration errors and hiding the option when no external storage is available.
• Highlighting accuracy and rendering improvements for complex EPUB structures.

Notes in your gems. Parallax removed.

• Add notes directly inside the Gems menu with a reveal text box — read and edit annotations without leaving your collection.
• Library and book settings are now more compact.
• Removed the tilt effect on the library (where covers shifted as you moved the phone) to save battery and keep scrolling smooth.
• Fixed swipe navigation edge cases.
• Highlight bug fixes for complex documents.
• Better error handling when Google Play is unavailable on your device.

Your library on an SD card — and it tilts.

• Store your entire library on an SD card and migrate books between internal and external storage in Settings.
• Library list view — switch between grid and list to scan titles and authors faster.
• Pinch to toggle between 2-up and 3-up cover columns in the grid.
• Book covers shift gently as you tilt the phone — a subtle sense of depth.
• A new page-turning animation — the first of several styles we're adding.
• Pull down inside a book to reload the reader page and fix any rendering issues instantly.
• Searching within selected text now searches the full book, not just the selection.
• Broken EPUB metadata and structure is repaired automatically during import, with a clearer message if it can't be fixed.
• Fixed: highlight creation, multi-page highlights, footnotes, references, and scroll stuttering.

Now on Google Play.

• GemReader is available on Google Play as an open beta — install from the Play Store or continue sideloading the APK. Same binary, same signing key, either way.

Your Kindle pile finally has a home.

• Import multi-part ZIP and 7z archives as a single book — no manual assembly needed.
• Scan a QR code on the archive password dialog instead of typing the password.
• Search the table of contents with fuzzy matching and jump directly to any chapter.
• Kindle format support — import MOBI and AZW books alongside your EPUB library.
• Pinyin auto-generates for Chinese books that lack ruby annotations when Show Pinyin is on.
• Footnotes and references have a cleaner, redesigned display.

Reading that feels good to hold.

• Toggle pinyin display — show or hide ruby annotation text in CJK content at any time.
• Haptic feedback when you create a highlight.
• Books now animate open when you tap them in the library.
• New reading fonts: Libre Baskerville and Literata, with expanded Noto multilingual script fonts.
• The screen stays on while you're reading — no more mid-chapter dimming.

Distraction gone. Search arrived.

• Immersion mode hides the status bar and all app chrome so nothing competes with the text.
• Search inside any book and results appear instantly as you type.
• Highlight colors are easier to tell apart at a glance, with refined margin placement and alignment.

Focus the paragraph. Bookmark the moment. Share the book.

• Tap any paragraph to focus it — the rest of the page softens so your eye stays on track.
• Bookmarks are fully rebuilt: a dedicated bookmark list, margin icons, and reliable persistence across sessions.
• Share one or multiple books with other GemReader users — original filenames are preserved end-to-end.
• A new Violet theme and refreshed app icon.

Folders all the way down.

• Collections now support nested subfolders — organize your library into as many levels as you need, with locked folders protecting everything inside.
• A new page-based reading mode lets you flip through books one page at a time using tap zones on the left and right edges of the screen.
• Reading progress is now visible directly on book covers in your library.

Everything smoother. Nothing new to learn.

• Navigation throughout the app is smoother — moving between your library, reader, and settings feels faster and more natural.
• Bookmarks are easier to use with a cleaner interface and more reliable text positioning.
• Notes and highlights now anchor to the exact passage more accurately, even across chapter boundaries.

Your spot saved. Your PIN faster.

• You can now bookmark any reading position and jump back to it instantly.
• A new high-contrast Chalk theme is available in Settings, alongside renamed Paper and Velvet themes.
• Locked folders use a redesigned PIN screen that's faster to navigate.

Two small bugs. Both gone.

• Folder colors now apply immediately after you pick them.
• Fixed a crash some users saw on launch.

Pick your colors. Pinch the diagrams. Find your chapter.

• You can now fully customize the reading theme — pick any color with the built-in color picker.
• Pinch to zoom images inside books.
• The table of contents now scrolls to your current chapter automatically and shows your reading progress on the side of the screen.

Lock the app. Favorite the rest.

• App lock is here — protect the whole app with your PIN or biometrics, with a 5-minute grace period so it doesn't interrupt quick switches.
• Added a Favorites tab so your most-read books are always one tap away.
• You can now import archives up to 2 GB, and the app will detect if you've already added a book so you don't end up with duplicates.

Import everything at once. Organize it your way.

• Import multiple books at once, including from ZIP or 7z archives.
• Collections (folders) let you organize and optionally lock groups of books.
• The app is now available in Russian and Korean.

The privacy release.

• Locked folders keep books, highlights, and notes encrypted separately — protected with your PIN and a per-folder key.
• The app now remembers exactly where you left off in every book.
• Added font support for Arabic, Amharic, Myanmar, and Cambodian scripts.