Yomu

Yomu is a reader for the manga and EPUB books on your own Kavita server. In manga it finds the speech bubbles and reads them on your device, so you can tap a word in a picture just like a word in a book. In books you tap the text itself. Either way you get the same dictionary popup as the other apps, and one tap sends the word to Anki.

What you need

A Kavita server with your manga and books, and an auth key for your Kavita user (in Kavita: User Settings → Auth Keys).
Optional, for read-along: an Audiobookshelf server with the audiobook, and Kaku for its transcript.
Optional, for mining: Anki with AnkiConnect. See Lookup and Anki.

Connecting Kavita

The first time you open Yomu, setup asks for your server address (for example https://kavita.example.com) and your auth key, then shows your Kavita libraries and asks which ones are Japanese. Only those show in Yomu. The rest of setup covers dictionaries, Anki and a few optional extras; Getting started walks through it.

Later you can change the server in Settings → Kavita (with Test Connection and Remove Server), and pick libraries again in Settings → Libraries. A turned-off library is hidden from the Library tab and Continue Reading.

The Library

Yomu has four tabs: Library, Dictionary, Stats and Settings.

Library opens with Continue Reading (series you’ve started and haven’t finished), then a row per library with its newest series and See All. A library’s page has a filter at the top: All, Reading or Downloaded.
A series page shows its Volumes (as a grid or a list), Chapters and Specials, how far you’ve read each one, and a button to start or continue reading.
On iPad and Mac, your libraries are also listed in the sidebar under the tabs.
Dictionary is a plain dictionary search. You can type in kana, kanji or romaji.

Reading manga

Open a volume and swipe, or tap the left or right third of the page, to turn pages. A tap in the middle shows the controls, with the page slider and the Aa button for the reader’s settings. Pinch to zoom in (up to 4×). On a keyboard, the arrow keys turn pages, and on the Mac the Reader menu has Next Page and Previous Page (Page Down and Page Up).

The Aa settings are kept per series. Use for All Series makes them the default for the others.

Mode: Paged or Long strip (one continuous scroll, with a Page width setting).
Direction: Right to left or Left to right.
Two-Page Spreads: Automatic (when the screen is wide enough), On or Off, and Show Cover Alone so the pages pair up the way the book was printed.

When a chapter ends, Yomu offers to read the next one.

Text recognition on manga

To look words up in manga, Yomu first needs its text recognition models. Download them once in Settings → Manga Text Recognition → Download Models. They find the speech bubbles and read them on your device; nothing is sent anywhere.

Then:

Tap text on a page to look it up.
Long-press and drag to draw a box over any area (a sign, a sound effect, text the detector missed) and read just that.
In the Aa settings, Show text boxes outlines what was found, and OCR pages ahead sets how many pages Yomu reads before you reach them, so the popup is instant.

Downloaded volumes can be read ahead of time too: Settings → Downloads → Read Text on Downloaded Pages. Then lookups in them work instantly, even offline.

Reading books

EPUB books open in a reader built for Japanese: vertical text, right-to-left pages, and furigana. Swipe, or tap near the left or right edge, to turn the page. A tap in the middle shows the controls, with Contents for the table of contents and Aa for settings.

Aa settings are kept per series, and Use for All Books makes them the default:

Theme: System, Light, Sepia or Dark.
Text: the font (the book’s own, 明朝 or ゴシック), size, line spacing and side margins.
Layout: Paged or Scrolling, and the Text direction: As in book, Vertical or Horizontal.
Furigana: From book or Hidden.
Mark words by Anki state: underlines words you haven’t mined and words you’re still learning; words you know stay plain.
Progress text: Always, With controls or Hidden, plus a thin Progress bar along the bottom of the screen. The text shows the percentage and characters read of the whole book, and the time left at your reading speed.

Tap a word to look it up. While the controls are showing, the first tap only hides them, and the next one looks up.

Character counts

Kavita’s word counts don’t work for Japanese, so Yomu counts characters itself: letters only (kana, kanji and so on), without punctuation, spaces or furigana. The counts appear on series tiles, the series page and Continue Reading, and feed the time-left estimate and Stats.

A book is counted when you open it. To count your whole library ahead of time, go to Settings → Storage → Character Counts and tap Count Characters. It covers light novel libraries, and books Kavita marks as Japanese in other book libraries. Until a volume is counted, Yomu shows an estimate with a “~” in front.

Read-along

Read-along plays an audiobook while you read the same book: the sentence being spoken lights up and the pages turn with it. It needs both servers: Audiobookshelf has the audio, and Kaku has its transcript. Set them up in Settings → Read-Along.

To pair a book with its audiobook:

Open the series page of an EPUB series. It has a Read-Along section.
From its menu, choose Pair with an Audiobook…. Audiobooks with a matching title are suggested; you can also search by title or author.
Choose Get Ready. Yomu matches the book’s text with Kaku’s transcript on your device, which takes about a minute. If Kaku hasn’t transcribed the audiobook yet, Yomu asks it to start; come back and get it ready again when it’s done.

The section then shows how many of the book’s sentences matched (front matter, contents pages and afterwords usually aren’t narrated). The same menu has Download Audio for listening offline, Match Again, Pair with Another Book… and Unpair.

In the reader:

An audio bar with play and pause, previous and next sentence, and speed comes and goes with the controls.
Turning or scrolling pages yourself stops following the audio and shows Follow Audio to jump back.
Looking up a word pauses the audio and offers From Here, to keep listening from that sentence. A card mined while reading along gets the sentence’s audio.
The headphones button in the top bar turns read-along off for that volume (plain reading), and on again from the page you’re on.
The screen doesn’t dim while the audio plays.

Your place goes to both Kavita and Audiobookshelf. If you listened further in Kiku since, the book opens at that sentence. Kiku’s Read in Yomu opens the paired book straight at the sentence you were listening to.

Downloads and offline reading

On a series page, download single volumes or the whole series. Nothing downloads unless you ask, or unless you turn on automatic downloads:

Settings → Downloads → Automatic Downloads works per library. Once you start a series, the volume you’re reading and the next few (Download Ahead) download by themselves. Remove Finished Volumes removes volumes from the device once you’ve read them to the end.
Downloads wait for Wi-Fi unless Download over Cellular is on.

When you’re offline, or Kavita can’t be reached, the Library shows only the series you’ve downloaded. Settings → Storage shows what’s on the device (downloads, dictionaries, text recognition models and the cache) and lets you remove downloads or clear the cache.

Progress sync

Your reading position goes back to Kavita, so other Kavita apps and the web reader pick up where you stopped. If you read offline, the progress waits and is sent when Kavita is reachable again; the status card at the top of Settings shows anything still waiting, with Sync Now.

Stats

The Stats tab shows your reading by week, month or all time: characters read in books, pages read in manga, lookups, cards mined and your streak. If you keep an immersion log in kechimochi, add its address in Settings → Stats and the Stats tab can show it too. Yomu never sends anything to it.

Settings

Reading: Kavita, Libraries, Downloads, Manga Text Recognition and Read-Along.
Lookup and Mining: dictionaries, word audio sources, Anki, and word marks in books (manga pages aren’t marked). See Lookup and Anki.
Stats: the kechimochi address.
Storage, Advanced (sharing the setup with your other apps, things waiting to sync, Run Setup Again, Export Logs) and About.