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Troubleshooting

Solutions to the most common issues. If you don't find your problem here, ask in the Readest Discord or check the issues tracker.

Can't connect to a local OPDS server on iOS or macOS

If you tap a catalog hosted on your home network (a private IP like 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, a .local hostname, or your own calibre Content Server) and nothing loads — even though the same URL works in a browser — the cause is almost always the system-level Local Network permission.

Public OPDS catalogs (Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg) don't need this permission because they're not on your LAN.

Related: Library → OPDS catalogs.

"400 Bad Request" connecting to a password-protected calibre server

If your calibre Content Server requires a username and password and Readest fails with Failed to load OPDS feed: 400 Bad Request — while the same catalog connects fine when you turn authentication off — try switching calibre's authentication mode to basic. calibre defaults to digest authentication over plain HTTP; although Readest supports digest, some calibre setups only connect reliably once auth is set to basic.

Basic authentication sends your calibre password in an easily reversible form, so prefer it on a trusted LAN or behind an https:// server.

Related: Library → OPDS catalogs.

CJK text renders as empty boxes on Linux Flatpak

The Flatpak sandbox can't see system fonts by default, so Chinese, Japanese, and Korean glyphs fall through to the "missing glyph" boxes on some distros.

Full details on the Flatpak Font wiki page.

Readest is using more storage than expected

Readest keeps a copy of every book you import on a device, and of every cloud book you open there. Those files are never removed automatically, so a phone or tablet you have read on for a while can hold several gigabytes even though you only ever opened books one at a time.

What it is not: Readest does not download your library in the background. Books added on your other devices arrive as cloud-only entries with a download badge, and their files stay in the cloud until you tap one. That is true for Readest Cloud and for WebDAV, Google Drive, S3, OneDrive, and iCloud alike.

To reclaim space, open a finished book's details, then the trash icon → Remove from Device Only. The file goes; the book, your position, and your annotations stay, and the cover shows a download badge again. There is no bulk version of this yet, so it is one book at a time.

Manage Cache on mobile clears temporary and orphaned files only. It leaves downloaded books alone by design, so it won't help here.

See Sync & Backup → Device storage for the full set of options, including what Delete All Books does and doesn't touch.

Verifying that a download is genuine

Not a bug, but worth checking when you downloaded an installer from anywhere other than the official Releases page — or just to be cautious. Every desktop installer is signed with minisign and comes with a matching .sig file.

See Advanced → Verify release files for step-by-step commands.

Still stuck?