Book Owl

v0.2.1Released 29 Aug 2026iPad · iOS 6+

An ereader for iOS 6 that takes its cues from iBooks: paper under everything, a shelf that keeps its own hours, page turns you can catch mid-curl — and an owl you can ask about the book, answered by your own machine.

What it is

An ereader for iPads still running iOS 6 — where the App Store can no longer sign in and nothing modern will install. It reads EPUB and PDF, and it takes its cues from iBooks: paper under everything, a wooden shelf, and page turns you can catch mid-curl.

Drag from the edge and the page follows your finger, lifting and falling back if you change your mind.

Reading

• The real page curl — interactive, not an animation played at you.
• Aa popover: seven faces, twelve sizes, and White, Sepia or Night. Changing any of them keeps your place on the page.
• Two-page spreads in landscape, single page in portrait, and your position remembered per book.
• Highlights in five colours, notes, bookmarks and in-book search — all of it survives changing the font.
• A contents screen with chapters, bookmarks and notes, each one a way back into the book.

Ask the Owl

New in 0.2 — a reading companion on a 2012 iPad, answered by your own machine.

Tap the owl in the reader’s chrome and a wooden panel slides out beside the page. Ask who someone is, or what just happened, and the answer is written onto paper word by word as it arrives — grounded in the pages you are reading, not in whatever the model half-remembers about the book.

The conversation happens beside the page, never over it — the book narrows to make room and keeps turning.

• Needs an Ollama server on your own network — a PC or Mac with a GPU is plenty. First tap, the owl introduces itself: type the address, tap Find models, pick one, done.
• Answers come from the chapter you are on. The reader keeps its place; pages keep turning behind the panel, and the owl follows along.
• Private by construction: nothing is sent anywhere until you name a server yourself, and it only ever talks to that machine. Cloud-routed models are refused outright.
• A gear beside Done edits the server, changes the model, or unlinks the owl entirely.

Books from a Calibre server

This is the part worth having. Book Owl speaks OPDS, the catalogue protocol calibre-web serves, so your whole library is available over the network — no desktop sync, no cable, no iTunes.

Give it an address once, with a username and password if the catalogue is protected.

Behind the list waits the bookcase: glass doors running plank to plank. Tap a shelf and the door swings up.

• The page opens on a typed catalogue list — sortable by date, title or author, each row stamped FETCHED once it has landed — with the glass bookcase one latch away.
• Browse by category. A library too big to scroll narrows to one of Calibre's own subject headings, asked for from the server rather than filtered on the iPad, in either view.
• Tap a book and it downloads onto your own shelf, cover and all.
• Anything you already have wears a small green check, so you can see at a glance what is yours and what is not.
• Large libraries page in as you scroll, and both EPUB and PDF come across.

Lifting the glass is the consent — tap a book behind the open door and it simply fetches.

Books from your own files

No server required. Book Owl looks for new files every time it comes to the front, so anything you drop in simply appears on the shelf.

• Open in… from Safari, Mail, Dropbox or anything else that can hand off a file — choose Book Owl and it imports on the spot.
• Copy files in yourself over SSH, iFile or Filza: a Cydia install reads from /var/mobile/Documents. Drop .epub or .pdf files there and launch the app.
• Covers come from the book itself; anything without one gets a cover printed for it in leather or paperboard.
• Books live in /var/mobile/Library/Books and are left alone if you uninstall — reinstalling picks your shelf up exactly where it was.

It keeps its own hours

After dark the bookcase lights its lamps. It follows the clock on your iPad, not a setting.

Warm light pools under each plank in the library; the glass doors have a sound when they open; the Calibre stacks take a cooler, moonlit cast instead, because amber lamplight over bottle-green paint looks like fog.

The library by daylight.

The same shelf after 8:30pm.

The reading room after hours — moonlight on bottle green, and the brass gone quiet.

Compatibility

It is built as an iPad bundle and laid out for a 10-inch screen, so it is not meant for an iPhone or iPod touch. The deployment target is iOS 6.0, which is every iPad that ran iOS 6 — the iPad 2, 3, 4 and the first mini. (The original iPad stopped at 5.1.1 and is out.)

The binary is armv7, which every iPad ran until iOS 11 removed 32-bit apps in 2017, so in principle it installs anywhere up to iOS 10.3.4 — untested, and expect the chrome to sit oddly there, since it is drawn for iOS 6's status bar and navigation metrics.