Releases

1.0 — 25 October 2026

The first release of Duck Reader: a quiet, folder-first ebook reader for Android.

Reading

One page at a time, turned by a swipe or by tapping the screen edges — you choose which, and the
two never compete for the same touch. A swipe acts when the finger is lifted.
A page turn that reads like paper: the arriving page travels in from the edge of the screen over
the page being left, which darkens under its shadow and slips aside.
The page and nothing else while you read. Tap the middle for the pages-left hint, the page number,
and Contents, Aa, Bookmarks and Search.
Text size, line spacing, margins and typeface, applied to the page already open.
White, sepia and night paper; night dimming that takes the screen's own brightness below what the
phone normally offers.
A daylit theme and a warm night one, either chosen or following the phone.

The shelf

+ adds a folder of books already on the phone through Android's own folder picker. The shelf
scans it, including subfolders, and remembers the grant.
Books are read where they lie. Each one is unpacked into the app's cache when it is read; nothing
is copied into the library or written back to the folder, and a cleared cache is rebuilt from the
same file.
Rows with cover, title, author and when the book was last put down, or a wall of covers. Order by
most recently read, title or author.
Progress on every row, filters for what you are reading, what is unread and what is finished, and
a single Continue reading line for the book opened most recently.
Title and author search, a Finished mark on the last page, and a bookmark kept for every book.
Remove a folder book from the shelf and its file is untouched; Settings → Bring back removed
books puts it back. Removing a folder stops the shelf reading from it and keeps its books' marks.
Books are not imported. Open with or a share says so and points at the folder route; books
imported by an earlier build stay on the shelf and remain readable.

Marks and search

Whole-book search, listing each match with the words around it and the book's own chapter name;
tapping a result reopens that passage.
Highlights in yellow, mint, rose or lavender, notes on a marked passage, and bookmarks — each
listed under the chapter name the book gives it, in Contents.
A notebook that gathers every note from every book, where a note can be rewritten or dropped and
the whole notebook saved as a Markdown file.
Reading places anchored to the text, so a change of font or screen size keeps your place in the
words.

Backup

Settings → Back up your reading writes one zip holding every reading place, bookmark,
highlight, note and setting. Books are not copied; they stay in their folders.
Restoring only ever adds: a reading place moves only when the backup's is further along, and a note
written since is never taken back. A backup made by an earlier build can still restore its books.

Formats

EPUB 2 and 3 as it is: the book's own package, chapters, covers and navigation.
FictionBook (FB2) converted into the same shape as an EPUB: a chapter per titled section, a
contents list, images and linked footnotes; UTF-8 and windows-1251.
MOBI (PalmDOC) converted: records decompressed, split at the book's page breaks, with pictures
and cover.
Refused with a plain explanation rather than half-read: DRM-protected books, AZW3, MOBI compressed
with Amazon's Huffman dictionary, encrypted fonts, and fixed-layout or scripted EPUBs.

Privacy

No account, no analytics, no ads, and no network permission at all. Reading places, bookmarks,
highlights, notes and settings stay on the device; books stay in the folders they belong to.

Under the hood

Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, minSdk 26, targetSdk 37, GPL-3.0.
117 unit tests and 163 tests that run on a phone, including hand-built EPUB, FictionBook and MOBI
files put through the real unpacking path.