Ebook Reader

Read EPUB and PDF ebooks alongside your audiobooks in FableFrog, with hands-free auto-scroll, customizable tap zones, Apple Pencil page turns, and reading progress that syncs to your server.

Overview

FableFrog isn't just for audiobooks. If your Audiobookshelf library includes EPUB or PDF ebooks, you can read them directly in the app. The built-in reader sits alongside the player, so switching between reading and listening is seamless — and starting in v1.9 it's a full reading experience of its own, with hands-free auto-scroll, tap zones you draw yourself, Apple Pencil support, and reading progress that saves and syncs across your devices.

Most of the features below apply to reflowable EPUB books, which is where FableFrog can lay out text, turn pages, and scroll. PDFs render as fixed pages you pinch to zoom — see Supported Formats.

Opening the Reader

There are several ways to open the reader for a book that has an ebook file:

From book detail: if a book has an EPUB or PDF file, the detail page shows a Read button alongside the usual Play button. Tap it to open the reader.
From the mini player: while a book is playing, tap the Read button (the book icon) on the mini player to open its ebook. It appears whenever the current book has a readable ebook — even before audio has started or if playback ran into an error.
From the full player: the player screen has a book button in its controls, and a Read item in its 3-dot menu. Both open the ebook for the book you're listening to without interrupting playback. (The menu's separate View Book item just opens the book's detail page.)

The reader opens in the same book context, so your audiobook and ebook stay linked. You can switch between them freely.

Turning Pages

By default, tapping the left quarter of the screen turns back a page and tapping the right quarter turns forward. Tapping the middle shows or hides the reader toolbar. You can redraw these regions however you like — see Customizing Tap Zones.

If you have an Apple Pencil, you can also turn pages without touching the screen:

Double-tap an Apple Pencil (2nd generation or later) to turn forward a page.
Squeeze an Apple Pencil Pro to turn back a page (requires iOS 17.5 or later).

Both gestures respect whatever you've set as your Pencil's preferred action in the iOS Settings app — if you've turned the system gesture off, FableFrog leaves it off too. There's no separate Pencil setting inside FableFrog.

Auto-Scroll

Auto-scroll reads hands-free by scrolling the page for you at a pace you set. It's available in Scroll Mode (turn on Scroll Mode in Reader Settings first).

Set the speed with the Auto-Scroll Speed slider in Reader Settings. It runs from Off up to 8.0×, where roughly 1.0× advances about one line every second and a half. Set it to Off to stop.
Start and stop on the fly by mapping a tap zone to Auto-Scroll Play / Pause (see Customizing Tap Zones). Tapping that zone toggles scrolling without opening settings.
It pauses while the toolbar is showing so the text doesn't slide away while you reach for a control, and resumes once the toolbar is hidden. It also pauses when you leave the app and stops at the end of the book.

Because the page keeps moving, FableFrog briefly holds it still every few seconds so your page counter and progress percentage stay accurate. How often it does this is set by the Save Position Every slider (2–30 seconds, default 5), which appears once auto-scroll is running.

Open the chapter list from the Table of Contents button in the toolbar. It opens as a sheet titled Chapters that you can drag up to full height.

The chapter you're currently reading is highlighted and marked with a book icon, and the list auto-scrolls to center it when you open it — no hunting for your place.
Books with nested chapters show subchapters indented under their parents. If a book has them, a button in the top corner lets you toggle subchapters on or off so you can collapse a deep TOC down to just its top-level chapters.
Tap any chapter to jump straight to it. The sheet closes and the reader moves to that spot.

Page Counter & Reading Progress

The top of the reader shows the current chapter title with a small "34 of 412 · 8%" counter beneath it — your page position and how far through the book you are. Before the book finishes calculating page positions, it briefly shows just the percentage.

Page numbers correspond to Audiobookshelf's page positions for the book, and the percentage reflects your overall progress through the whole EPUB.

Customizing Tap Zones

Tap zones let you decide what tapping different parts of the page does. Open Edit Tap Zones from Reader Settings to open a full-screen visual editor.

Draw a zone by dragging a rectangle anywhere on the page preview. Pick which action it triggers from the row of colored pills at the top before you draw, or tap a pill while a zone is selected to reassign it.
Available actions: Previous Page, Next Page, Play / Pause, Jump Forward, Jump Backward, and Auto-Scroll Play / Pause.
Adjust a zone by tapping to select it, then dragging its body to move it or its handles to resize it. Each zone shows an × button to delete it.
Reset clears every zone at once, and Done saves your layout.

A few things worth knowing:

Taps outside every zone show or hide the reader toolbar.
Play / Pause and the Jump actions only do something while audio is playing — tap one with nothing playing and it just toggles the toolbar instead. The jump amounts follow your Skip Forward / Skip Backward settings (30 seconds forward, 15 back by default).
Out of the box, the left quarter of the page is Previous Page and the right quarter is Next Page — reset returns you to a blank slate, not to these defaults, so redraw the zones you want.
Tap zones are global, so your layout follows you from book to book.

Reading Position & Sync

FableFrog saves where you are in an ebook automatically and syncs it to your Audiobookshelf server, right alongside your listening progress.

Your position is saved locally as you read and pushed to the server continuously, with a final save when you close the book — so it's always up to date.
Pick up on any device: close a book on your phone, open it on your iPad, and the reader lands exactly where you stopped.
Reading an ebook to the end marks the book finished, the same threshold used for audio, and finished status sticks even if you reopen an earlier chapter.
For books that have both audio and an ebook, reading the ebook won't overwrite your audiobook's canonical progress on the server — your ebook place and listening place are tracked so they don't clobber each other.

Saving is best-effort and never interrupts your reading: if the app can't reach the server for a moment, it keeps your position locally and syncs it when it can.

Mini-Player Overlay

When you open the reader while an audiobook is playing, a compact mini-player floats at the bottom of the screen. It shows the current book and playback controls so you can play, pause, and skip without leaving the reader. Tap it to expand back to the full player.

The reader reserves space at the bottom so the mini-player never covers the last lines of text. Tapping outside your tap zones hides both the toolbar and the mini-player for a clean, full-screen page.

Search

Search within the current ebook by tapping the search icon in the reader toolbar. Results highlight matching text in context, and tapping a result jumps to that location. Search works across all chapters in the current EPUB.

Supported Formats

FableFrog supports two ebook formats:

EPUB — the standard format for reflowable ebooks. Text adapts to your screen, and all of the reader features above — auto-scroll, tap zones, the chapter list, page counter, and typography settings — apply here.
PDF — fixed-layout documents render as-is. Pinch to zoom for detailed pages or small text. Tap to show or hide the toolbar.

Format availability depends on what's in your Audiobookshelf library. FableFrog reads whatever ebook files your server provides for each book.

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