Books

ForeverLM treats books differently from articles and papers. Each chapter of a book is a source of its own, so you read, listen to and review a book a chapter at a time.

Adding a Book

On the Library's Books tab, choose Add Book…, or drop the file on the tab: a PDF, an EPUB, or a DRM-free Kindle book. ForeverLM copies it into your library, which syncs it through your iCloud, and the book is there to read at once. A PDF book opens as the whole book, with its own outline as the Contents, and an EPUB opens as the whole book in reading order, while their chapters are found in the background; a small spinner on the book's row says what it is doing. Your Book Chapter Splitting model (on the Tasks tab of Settings → Background) finds them: for a PDF it reads the outline, and each chapter is a run of the PDF's pages; for an EPUB it groups the book's own documents into chapters. Either way the book stays one file, with nothing unpacked beside it. When the chapters arrive, anything you marked and the place you reached move to the chapter they belong to, and a book open in the Reader follows you there. If the chapters can't be found, ForeverLM says so and tries again the next time it opens, and the book stays readable as one piece. Your Book Author model also reads the front matter for a better title and author, and a file that reads like a scholarly paper is pointed out rather than split. An assistant connected over MCP can send an EPUB with import_epub.

A book is the same book only when it is the same file. Adding a file you added before keeps the one book, even after ForeverLM wrote a scan's text or an EPUB's chapters into its copy. A different file is a different book, whatever its title: a textbook and a 1957 monograph both called Bioenergetics are two books, each in a folder of its own (the second one's name gets the start of a code that identifies its file, such as Bioenergetics 4545308b), and adding one never changes the other's details, chapters or file. Two books may share a title, and renaming a book to another one's title is fine. To give a book a fresh copy of its file, such as a clean download of a damaged EPUB, right-click the book and choose Replace Book File…; its chapters are found again in the new file.

Older builds kept a PDF book as one file per chapter, and an EPUB unpacked into a folder of its files. The first launch of a build that keeps every book as one file puts each such book back together: a PDF book as its own PDF where every chapter's pages are still in it, or else the chapters joined; an EPUB by packing its folder back into the book's file. Nothing about a chapter changes, its highlights and reading position included.

A scanned PDF, whose pages are only pictures, is read in the background before its chapters are found. A book counts as scanned when at least half its pages carry no text of their own; an ebook or a publisher's PDF never does, even with a picture cover or photo pages. On the Mac, OCR reads every page of a scan that carries no text of its own. Your Scanned Page Proofreading model, also on the Tasks tab, then checks each page's lines against a picture of the page and corrects what OCR misread, such as K⁺, β or 10⁻⁷. The corrected text is written into the book's PDF beneath the print, so chapters, search and highlights all work as they do in a book that came with text. A long scan takes a few minutes, and its proofreading is billed like other background work; you read the pages meanwhile. If proofreading fails, no unchecked text is kept and the book is tried again later.

Why one source per chapter:

• Your AI assistant gets more focused context when the source covers one topic
• You can work through chapters as you read, rather than the whole book upfront

Reading a Book

A book opens at the chapter you pick, where you left it, and reads as one book: scroll past the end of a chapter and the next one follows; scroll up past its start and you are in the one before. On the Mac this holds for a book imported from a PDF and one imported from an EPUB, and a PDF book shows its front matter and index too; on iPhone and iPad it holds for an EPUB book, while a PDF book's chapters open one at a time.

• The Reader's title and position ("6 of 31") follow the chapter you are in, and so does everything that belongs to a chapter: its reading position, how far you got, notes and highlights you make, and the chat you start about a passage.
• Contents lists every chapter and jumps to the one you choose: on the Mac choose Contents… from the Reader's ⋯ menu, on iPhone and iPad tap the list button in the Reader's toolbar.
• On the Mac, Find searches the whole book. A link inside the book — the contents page, an endnote and its way back — scrolls to what it names.
• On iPhone and iPad the chapters come from iCloud as you reach them, so the next one may take a moment to appear the first time.

Hiding or Removing a Book

Select a book in the Books list and press Delete, or right-click its cover, then choose Hide Book. Every chapter leaves the list together; nothing is deleted, and hiding is visual only, so chat, search and reviews still draw on the book. The foot of the Books list then shows a quiet N hidden books row, which opens Hidden Items. Click a hidden book there to read it in the Reader, where it opens like any book, at the chapter you reached; it stays hidden from the Books list. The arrow beside it lists its chapters, and each opens the same way. Unhide brings the whole book back, and Show one chapter. Selecting several covers and pressing Delete offers Hide N Books.

The same confirmation offers Remove Book from Library, which forgets the book but leaves its files in iCloud, with a short undo. To delete the files as well, use Remove Book in the cover's right-click menu and choose Remove & Delete Files.

Tips

• Skip appendices and references: Work through only the chapters you're actively reading.