Mac · iPhone · iPad · on the App Store · open format
A library of your books and articles, highlights made right in the text, and excerpts that travel to your Obsidian notes on their own. Everything lives on your disk: the app runs with no network and talks to no server of mine.
Library
Twenty years of books is not a list of titles. It is duplicates, several editions of the same book, tags you invented yourself, and the eternal question of where you read that. Beresta's catalogue is tested on a live library of two thousand-odd records and 21 GB of files.
Shelves with counts and manual ordering. Reading lists. A golden shelf of 28 books where a new arrival pushes out the weakest, each with a reason recorded — rereading, or recommending. Tags are edited by hand and survive a re-import.
One book can hold several files — an EPUB from your phone, a scanned PDF, an FB2 someone sent you. Beresta folds them into a single record, shows how far you read in each, and remembers if you decided two books were not the same after all.
A Calibre library moves over whole: books, covers, shelves and the highlights you already made. From Zotero come documents, annotations and saved article snapshots — along with the collection tree.
A button in your browser — Chrome, Safari or Firefox — files the page into the library. Beresta builds a real EPUB out of it, with images, a table of contents and text free of banners, and it reads in the same engine, with the same highlights, as any book. The original snapshot and the address it came from stay beside it.
The page does not go to anyone's cloud: it goes to a receiver at 127.0.0.1 with a key, which is to say it never leaves your machine. RSS feeds are subscribed in the same place and arrive the same way.
Beresta on your Mac serves the library as an OPDS catalogue — the one nearly every reader app speaks. Open the address on a phone, a tablet, an e-ink reader, and your shelves are there. No mailing files to yourself, no uploading them anywhere.
Honestly, where the catalogue ends
Reading
The text reflows to your settings instead of being shown as it came. You notice the difference on the second page, and you have not stopped noticing it by the three hundredth.
Typeface, including one of your own. Size from 75 to 250 per cent, leading, column width, margins, one column or two. Justified text with proper hyphenation. Paged or continuous.
Follow the system, paper, sepia and night. Night inverts PDFs too, so a scan stops glaring at you in the dark. A footnote opens in a popover instead of throwing you to the end of the chapter.
Each device keeps its own reading place, so opening a book on your Mac doesn't overwrite how far you got on the phone. Beresta offers to continue from the furthest point, not from yesterday's.
Six highlight colours, your own thought beside the quote, a panel of excerpts grouped by chapter: pick a quote and you are in the text, and back again. And then the excerpts return to you on their own — the daily review shows five cards, and the intervals are worked out by an FSRS‑6 implementation running entirely on your device, with no server and no subscription.
Honestly, where reading ends
The promise
“Yours and only yours” turns into a slogan easily, so every claim below rests on how the program is built, not on good intentions.
Books and highlights sit on your disk. The app works fully offline. Between devices your data moves through storage of your own: a folder you pick — iCloud Drive included — or your own Backblaze B2 bucket or WebDAV server. To B2 and WebDAV it goes encrypted: the key is derived from your passphrase on the device itself and I never see it. Through a plain folder the files travel as they are, the way any other file of yours sits in that folder. Either way, not one copy reaches me.
Nobody revokes a book you bought, shuts the service down or changes the terms. Marvin, Gerty, KyBook — readers people loved. They closed, and years of margin notes went with them.
You can leave at any moment without losing a single note.
Where excerpts land
Every excerpt arrives with an address — part, chapter, section — and a link that opens the book exactly where you stopped.
The highlight colour survives, your comment stands next to the quote, your tags stay yours. The exchange is one-way: the plugin only writes to notes and never reads them back — a parsing mistake would damage your own records.
Fatigue rarely comes from work; more often it comes from decisions left open all day.
We measure time willingly and attention almost never, though the second runs out faster.
Neighbours
Three programs already do parts of this work, and some of those parts better than I do. So the case for each one starts with what it does better.
$119.88 a year
no free tier —
a 30-day trial only.
Not sold apart
from Readwise
Better than me
Feeds arrive in the background while the app is closed — mine are polled only when the window is open. There is a mail address for newsletters, parsing of videos and threads, summaries, reading aloud. It pulls highlights out of Kindle, Apple Books, Instapaper and Pocket, which Beresta will never reach. Today it already runs in a browser, on Windows and on Android — with me that is still only a promised web version; its extensions install from the stores in one click as well.
What I took
The idea that what you save should be handed back to you rather than filed away. The daily review grew out of theirs — except the intervals are worked out by your device, with no server and no subscription.
Where we differ
Reader is not a book library but a read-it-later inbox, where a book is one document type among many: no shelves, no Calibre library to bring over, files added one at a time, and you cannot highlight in several colours — tags are offered instead of colour.
And then the question of where all this lives. With them, on servers of theirs you have no access to, and with no end-to-end encryption — they say so themselves; under the terms you grant a perpetual, irrevocable licence to your content, while the service may delete your account and all its files at any moment and takes no responsibility for the loss. With me there is no account at all: a page saved from the browser goes to a receiver at 127.0.0.1, meaning it never leaves your machine, and between devices the data travels through your own folder, encrypted before it is sent.
free
GPL, since 2006
Better than me
As a catalogue Calibre is stronger than Beresta and will stay stronger: 27 input formats against my five, conversion between them, sending a book straight to a Kindle, an EPUB editor, plugins, covers and metadata fetched by title or ISBN, Windows and Linux — and all of it free, for the twentieth year running.
What I took
The library itself: it moves over whole — books, covers, shelves and the highlights you already made. And the principle underneath it: a catalogue should be a file another program can open.
Where we differ
In Calibre the reader is a separate program and a highlight lives attached to its book. Here they are one thing, and the excerpt is a first-class object: it has a panel, a search, your own thought beside the quote, and a way of coming back to you over time. Duplicates are folded together on two clues of differing strength, and the program remembers when you decide two books are not the same.
Calibre's own manual tells you not to keep the library on a network or cloud drive: “if you put your calibre library in Google Drive, you will suffer data loss.” There is no native iPhone app: the only way in is a browser, and it works only while a Calibre server is running at home. In Beresta, moving through your own folder is the normal mode, and an encrypted one.
free
300 MB of storage,
then from $20 a year
Better than me
One click in the browser and Zotero has the citation; one more and it sits in your Word document in any of thousands of styles. Shared group libraries, DOI and ISBN lookup, OCR of scans, Windows, Linux, Android. If a book is a source for something you are writing, use Zotero — Beresta does not do this and is not going to.
What I took
The link back into the exact spot: Zotero did it first and without a middleman — zotero://open-pdf, and here it is beresta://open/<uuid>. And a road running our way: documents, annotations, saved snapshots and the collection tree all move over from Zotero.
Where we differ
Zotero displays a document; Beresta typesets it: the text reflows to your size, margins and columns, there are four page schemes, justification with hyphenation, footnotes in a popover. A saved snapshot from Zotero becomes a readable book here rather than a saved web page.
Zotero's sync runs only through Zotero's own servers: WebDAV covers the attached files, but highlights, notes and tags still travel through them. The schema is not frozen, and Zotero asks you outright not to depend on it — “the SQLite database structure can change between Zotero releases.” Beresta's schema freezes at 1.0 before the public release, and inside 1.x things may only be added.
What none of the three does is hold the book, its markup and the way into your notes in one place, entirely on a disk you own. That is the whole reason Beresta exists.
Beresta — paid, closed source, open data format; the Obsidian plugin and browser extensions are MIT.
Honestly, where it stands
works
not yet
Questions
On the App Store, one purchase covering Mac, iPhone and iPad: apps.apple.com. It needs macOS 26 or iOS 26; on anything older it will not launch. Before the release it ran on my own machines every day, against a live library of two thousand-odd records and 21 GB of files — and it is still tested against that library.
$19.99 in the US, 1,790 ₽ in Russia, 11,990 ₸ in Kazakhstan — one purchase covering Mac, iPhone and iPad. It is a one-time purchase with a year of updates included; renewing after that is optional, and the version you bought keeps working for good. No subscription. And separately: your books and highlights are not locked inside the app — the database is in an open format, so you can walk away at any point without losing anything.
Nothing happens to them. The database is a plain SQLite file with a documented schema, the books are ordinary files on your disk, and highlights export as W3C Web Annotation and Markdown. You do not need Beresta itself to read any of it: any program that speaks SQL will do. The schema is documented and published, and a 72-line reader in Python sits beside it — it prints your quotes without needing Beresta or Obsidian. The way out does not depend on what becomes of me.
Yes — though not at once, and not as a separate app for every system: one person cannot do four platforms properly, and doing them badly is worse than not doing them at all. The way there is the web version. It opens your library straight in a browser, which means Windows, Linux and Android as well. It only reads, and it reads from the same storage of yours that sync already uses: your library does not move onto a server of mine, and is not kept there. I am not naming dates yet: first the release for Mac, iPhone and iPad; the web version is the next milestone. That order has been the plan since day one.
No. The library and the reader stand on their own. The plugin is there for people whose notes already live in Obsidian — if yours don't, nothing is missing.
Not today — and it is the most common request I have not closed. What does move over completely is a Calibre or Zotero library: books, covers, shelves, the collection tree and the highlights already in them.
Through storage you choose: a folder — iCloud Drive included — or your own Backblaze B2 bucket or WebDAV server. To B2 and WebDAV the data is encrypted on your device before it is sent: the key comes from your passphrase and I do not hold it. Through a folder the files travel as they are, so pick a folder you trust. I run no server either, so there is nothing to intercept and nowhere to intercept it. When a server does appear, it will be an option rather than a requirement.
Yes. A button in Chrome, Safari or Firefox files the page into your library: Beresta builds a real EPUB with images from it, which reads in the same reader and takes the same highlights, and the original snapshot and address stay beside it. The page does not go to anyone's cloud — the receiver listens on 127.0.0.1, on your own machine. Feeds are subscribed in the same place. Two caveats: the extensions are installed by hand for now, not from the stores, and there is no button for mobile browsers — articles reach the phone through sync.
EPUB, PDF, FB2, TXT and MOBI. FB2 includes the old encoding that Russian libraries are full of. DJVU and CBZ do not open.
What's next
You are on the list
You are down — nothing to confirm. I will write when Beresta can be installed on Windows.
This list is now about Windows: I will write when Beresta can be installed there too. No dates until I can see them myself. People who signed up before the release get their own letter about Mac, iPhone and iPad — the one I promised.
Reading
Where Amazon keeps them, what you can export today, and what stays locked in.
Calibre is a fine catalogue. Here is where it stops being enough, and what the alternatives actually give you.
It handles quotes beautifully and holds no books. What that trade-off costs over the years.