Quire

A beautiful, self-hosted ebook reader for the web — inspired by the Google Play Books experience, but running entirely on your own server.

Upload an ePUB or PDF and Quire automatically fetches its metadata (cover, description, author, categories) from Google Books, shelves it in a warm, literary library view, and opens it in a distraction-free reader with page-turn animations, themes, typography controls and synced reading progress.

Features

• Library — cover-art grid, search, format filters, sorting, a "Continue reading" shelf, and drag-and-drop uploads with live progress
• Automatic metadata — embedded ePUB/PDF metadata is extracted on upload, then enriched via the Google Books API (description, categories, page count, high-res cover)
• ePUB reader — a custom-built engine (no epub.js): real pagination via CSS columns, animated page turns, single/two-page spreads, three reading themes (Paper / Sepia / Dusk), font family & size & line-spacing controls, table of contents, in-book links
• PDF reader — crisp canvas rendering, spreads, zoom, outline navigation, night (invert) mode
• Progress sync — your position is saved server-side per book; resume from any device on your network
• Self-contained — one Docker image, one /data volume (SQLite + your book files). No accounts, no cloud.

Run with Docker

A prebuilt multi-architecture image (linux/amd64 and linux/arm64, so it runs on regular servers, Apple Silicon, and Raspberry Pi alike) is published to the GitHub Container Registry:

docker run -d --name quire -p 3391:3391 -v quire-data:/data ghcr.io/aculix/epub-reader:latest

or with compose:

docker compose up -d

Then open http://localhost:3391 (or your server's address).

Available tags: latest (newest build of main) and v1.2.3 / v1.2 / v1 for releases. To pin an exact build, use its digest: ghcr.io/aculix/epub-reader@sha256:…

To update:

docker compose pull && docker compose up -d

Build it yourself

docker build -t quire .
docker run -d --name quire -p 3391:3391 -v quire-data:/data quire

Configuration

Env var	Default	Description
PORT	3391	HTTP port
DATA_DIR	/data	Where the database and books live
MAX_UPLOAD_MB	300	Maximum upload size

Note: Quire has no built-in authentication — it is designed for a home network or to sit behind a reverse proxy (Authelia, Tailscale, basic auth, etc.).

Develop locally

npm install
npm --prefix web install
npm run dev

• Web app: http://localhost:5173 (proxies API calls)
• API: http://localhost:3391

Architecture

server/          Express + SQLite (better-sqlite3)
  index.js       static serving + API mounting
  books.js       upload / list / file / cover / progress routes
  epubMeta.js    ePUB OPF parsing + cover extraction (JSZip)
  enrich.js      Google Books metadata lookup + cover download
web/             React + Vite + TypeScript
  src/epub/      custom ePUB engine (unzip → parse → paginate → animate)
  src/pdf/       pdf.js-based PDF reader + upload-time cover rendering
  src/reader/    shared reader chrome (bars, TOC, settings)
  src/pages/     Library & Reader routes

Book files are stored as /data/books/<id>.<ext>, covers as /data/covers/<id>.<ext>, metadata and reading progress in /data/quire.db (SQLite, WAL mode).

License

MIT © Aculix Technologies