Your library is not a cloud feature

ReadAware stores your books, your annotations, and the memory it builds about your reading on your device. Not cached locally with a cloud copy as the real one — stored, as the source of truth, in a local database the app reads and writes directly.

This is unusual enough for a modern app that it deserves an explanation, because it is not an implementation detail. It is the design.

A reading app knows too much

A library is one of the more intimate datasets a person has. What you read, what you underline, what you ask about a difficult passage at 1 a.m. — an app that watches you read holds something closer to a diary than to a media collection.

ReadAware's whole premise makes this sharper. The product is memory: it distills your highlights and conversations into a durable profile of what you read and how you think. Building that and then shipping it to someone else's server by default seemed, to put it mildly, like the wrong trade. So the rule is simple: the data lives with you, and the app must be fully usable offline. Import, read, annotate, search — none of it touches a network.

What the network is for

Two things, both optional:

• Inference. The assistant runs on an API key you bring. Requests go from your machine to your provider — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, a local-network endpoint, whoever you chose. There is no ReadAware server in the middle, which also means nobody to meter you, upsell you, or log your questions.
• Sync, eventually. Multi-device sync is coming, and its design follows the same rule: the server is a dumb relay for end-to-end encrypted change logs. Your devices reconcile; the server stores ciphertext it cannot read. Since there is no server-side feature that needs your plaintext, there is nothing to trade away.

The quiet benefits

Privacy is the argument that fits in a sentence, but daily life with a local-first app is mostly about other things. Everything is fast, because every read is a local read. Nothing spins. The app works on a plane, in a dead zone, and in ten years — if we disappeared tomorrow, your library and every note in it still open on your machine, and your books are still the original files you imported.

Software you rely on for thinking should be structured like something you own, not something you rent. This one is.