About Publ

A simple ePub review tool. Lightweight, elegant, focused on reviewing — not editing.

Publ is a browser-based ePub app for marking up books — an annotation and review tool that runs in any browser. Under the hood it's a clean online ePub reader, with a review layer on top built for editorial QA teams, proofreaders, and authors. You open an ePub, highlight passages, leave comments, drop pins on images or page regions, and export your notes as a single file you can email to whoever owns the ePub source.

In the free tier, Publ runs entirely in your browser. Your files never leave your device — no account, no upload, no cloud. Just you, the book, and your notes. A paid tier with optional cloud sync, sharing, and integrations is on the roadmap; local-only stays the default.

Publ is built for editors, indie authors, proofreaders, and anyone who reviews ePubs as part of a production workflow. It is not an ePub editor. If you need to change the book itself, do that in Sigil, Calibre, Vellum, InDesign, or wherever the source lives. Publ is what you use to tell them what to change. See also how Publ compares to Thorium, the flagship Readium-based desktop ePub reader.

Key features

  • Highlight text in five colours.
  • Add comments to any highlight, with autosave.
  • Pin notes to images, figures, blank areas, or anywhere a text selection won't reach.
  • Search the book across every chapter — browser's native find can't reach paginated pages, so Publ ships its own. Press Cmd/Ctrl + F to focus the search input. Match case and whole-word toggles included.
  • Reply threads on every note, so multiple reviewers can pass a file along and add their feedback in order.
  • Baked-in screenshots captured at the moment you make each annotation — so your notes still point to the right place even after the ePub is re-exported.
  • Sort and filter notes by location, date, colour, or type — plus a free-text search across note bodies, replies, and the captured highlight.
  • Export a single self-contained JSON file with every note, reply, and screenshot embedded.
  • Import a notes file back onto the matching ePub to pick up where someone else left off.
  • Light, dark, and sepia themes.
  • Keyboard shortcuts for paging and jumping between notes — keyboard-first navigation with accessibility in mind. Full screen-reader and WCAG coverage is still a work in progress; feedback welcome.
  • Local-first. Works fully offline. Installable as a Progressive Web App — a website that behaves like an app once installed.
  • Free in this preview. A paid tier with optional cloud features is planned.

Why Publ?

Most ePub tools either do too much (full editors with steep learning curves) or too little (basic readers with no real annotation workflow). Publ does one thing — review — and tries to do it well.

Lightweight. No install required. Open a tab, drop in an ePub, start marking it up.

Elegant. One clean panel for your notes. No cluttered toolbars, no popup windows, no chunky sidebars fighting the reader.

Simple. Highlight, comment, pin, export. That's the loop.

Powerful. Resilient annotations that survive ePub re-exports, multi-reviewer reply chains, and a single notes file you can version-control or email.

Focused. Publ does not edit ePubs. It never will. Editing belongs in your authoring tool; reviewing belongs here.

Who is it for?

  • Freelance editors reviewing manuscripts before final layout.
  • Indie authors proofing their own ePub before publishing.
  • In-house reviewers handing structured feedback back to whoever owns the source file.
  • Beta readers who want to leave more than just a star rating.

How it works

  1. Open an ePub from your computer.
  2. Read it like a normal e-reader.
  3. Select text to highlight; click a highlight to add a comment.
  4. Drop pins on images or non-text areas with the pin tool.
  5. Export your notes as a single .publ.json file.
  6. Send the file (and the ePub if needed) to whoever is making the edits.
  7. They — or another reviewer — can import the notes file back into Publ to see and reply to every note.

Privacy

On the free tier, your ePub and your notes stay on your device. Publ has no server-side storage of your reading content, no analytics on what you highlight, and no sign-up. Clearing your browser storage clears Publ.

A paid tier is planned for users who want cloud sync, shared review workspaces, and integrations (BugHerd, Jira, Linear, Asana). Cloud features will always be opt-in. Local-only stays the default and will keep working free.

Browser support

Publ is designed for Chrome first. It also runs on Chromium-based browsers — Edge, Brave, Arc, Opera — and most features work in Firefox and Safari too. Some niceties (the native “Save As” dialog on export, File System Access on open) only exist in Chromium today, so the experience is smoothest there.

Mobile is not a target. Publ is a desktop and tablet tool; review work belongs on a real screen.

What Publ is not

  • Not an ePub editor.
  • Not a library manager.
  • Not a cloud service today. Cloud sync and team features are planned for a future paid tier.

Status

Publ is in preview. Core review features are usable today; polish and edge cases are still landing. Feedback is very welcome — every report shapes the next release.

Email luke@quaal.uk with bugs, ideas, or use-case stories.

Credits

Built by Quaal Ltd. ePub rendering powered by foliate-js. Publ also stands on Dexie, modern-screenshot, lucide-react, React, Next.js, and other open-source projects.

Full licence texts and copyright notices: Open-source notices.