Reading and library

Reading & library

How Candela behaves once a fiction is in your hands — the reader surface, the marks you leave in the text, and the shelves that keep a growing library navigable. For voices and playback tuning see Voices; for where chapters come from see Fiction sources.

The hybrid reader

Every chapter opens in a hybrid reader / audiobook view. Swipe between two faces of the same screen:

• Audiobook view — cover art, a scrubber, and transport (play / pause / skip), for eyes-free listening.
• Reader view — the chapter text in EB Garamond, for reading along or reading silently.

As the engine speaks, the current sentence is highlighted in brass and the highlight glides forward sentence by sentence to match the read-aloud rhythm. Auto-advance carries you into the next chapter; the next chapter is eager-downloaded so playback never stalls at a boundary.

Highlights & notes

Shipped v1.1.3 (#1079 / #1088).

Long-press to select text in the reader, then pick a colour and (optionally) attach a note. Highlights persist on-device and sync across your devices when InstantDB cloud sync is on. Tap a saved highlight to edit its note or remove it. The select→highlight gesture is covered by an on-device instrumented Compose test (HighlightGestureTest) plus 13 offset-mapping unit tests, so the selection path is a deterministic regression guard.

Find in chapter

Shipped via #998.

Search the loaded chapter for any phrase. Matching is case-insensitive and non-overlapping; the next / previous chevrons wrap around from the last hit back to the first. Selecting a match scrolls it into view and paints it in the search-highlight overlay — useful for jumping to a name or picking up where you stopped reading.

Chapter previews

Shipped v1.2.0 (#1189 / #1201).

Chapter-list entries show a snippet of the chapter's body text, so you can glance at what a chapter opens with before committing to it — handy for anthologies, RSS feeds, and reference sources where titles alone are thin.

Resume

The Library's Resume button is smart-resume: it respects your last paused / playing intent, so it never auto-plays at you when you opened the app intending to read. Reading positions (and bookmarks) sync across devices through cloud sync.

Library shelves

Three built-in shelves: Reading, Read, Wishlist. A fiction can sit on several shelves at once (membership is many-to-many). Open a fiction's Manage shelves sheet to toggle which shelves it belongs to; the Library's shelf chips filter the grid to one shelf at a time. The chips are also the targets the AI assistant uses when you say "add this to my Reading shelf" (see AI chat).

Library sort

Shipped via #793. The All shelf has a sort dropdown:

Mode	Orders by
Title (default)	A→Z by title
Author	A→Z by author
Recently added	newest in your library first
Recently played	most recently listened first
Longest unread	books you added but never opened, oldest first — "what did I forget about?"

Your choice persists across launches.

Add a fiction by URL

The Library's add (+) entry opens a paste-anything sheet. It accepts Royal Road fiction URLs today (the GitHub branch is wired but stubbed pending the GitHub-source work); a Paste button fills the field straight from your clipboard in one tap, and any error surfaces inline so you can fix the URL without retyping. For arbitrary web pages that aren't a known source, the always-on Readability catch-all turns any article URL into a one-chapter fiction instead.

See also

• Export & extras — make-your-own-audiobook (.m4b), EPUB export, the home-screen widget, onboarding
• Voices — voice families, per-voice tuning, the voice library
• Settings reference — every knob, including sleep timer, DND, and bedtime mode