Getting books onto your phone

Overview

Your desktop library and your phone's library are separate by default. Getting books from one to the other is a manual, one-tap action, not something that happens automatically in the background. That's different from progress syncing, covered in How your progress syncs across devices, which requires nothing from you at all.

This feature requires an active Pro plan or higher. It isn't available on the free tier, which also can't run the mobile app in the first place, and it isn't available on the base paid tier either.

What you need

• The same account signed in on both desktop and phone
• Both devices on the same Wi-Fi network
• The desktop app open and running, not just installed

Pulling your books

Once those three conditions are met, your phone detects your desktop automatically over the local network. A sync button appears in the Library on mobile. Tap it to pull your books down.

Nothing happens until you tap that button. You decide when to sync, and the app won't do it for you.

After the sync

Books you pull down are cached on your phone and available offline from then on. You won't need another network trip to keep reading them.

If your phone can't find your desktop

Automatic discovery doesn't always work, particularly on guest Wi-Fi, hotel networks, or networks with client isolation enabled. If that happens, there's a manual fallback: your desktop's Settings screen shows its own network address, which you can type into your phone instead of relying on discovery. For the full walkthrough, see My phone can't find my desktop for sync.

A note on platforms

This works reliably on iOS, and from both Windows and Mac desktops. On Android, automatic discovery is newer and less proven, so the manual address fallback is the safer bet there for now.