Open source · Self-hosted · Local-first
A home for your reading life.
Read your books, capture what stays with you, and turn your reading into thought and writing — all in one quiet place.
Read your books, capture what stays with you, and turn your reading into thought and writing — all in one quiet place.
Your reading life is already real. It is just scattered across software that never speaks to itself.
Nostos gives your reading a home.
Nostos is arranged the way a reading life actually works: a shelf for what you own, a desk for what you are writing, and a room where ideas are allowed to meet each other.
Your own private catalogue, holding print editions alongside EPUBs, PDFs, and audiobooks. It is meant to feel like the record of a reading life, not a spreadsheet you have to maintain.
A three-panel writing environment where your reading notes sit beside your working drafts. No switching between windows or hunting through separate databases to find a citation.
Every concept your reading keeps returning to, drawn as one graph. Authors, ideas, and your own notes sit together, with links back to the passages that mention each one.
Your EPUBs, PDFs, audiobooks, and paper books can belong to the same reading life. Nothing has to be left out because it arrived in the wrong shape.
A PDF needs pagination, an EPUB needs reflowing, an audiobook needs chapters. Nostos gives each format the reader it deserves, and remembers where you stopped in every one.
Your existing files come in as they are, and the free catalogues are there when you want them. Nostos reads EPUB, PDF, TXT, MOBI and audio, and leaves every file in storage you control.
Five small steps that describe most of what the app is for. Everything else is detail.
Start a book in whichever format you already own it.
Mark the passage that stays with you.
Write the thought without leaving the page.
Come back days or months later and find it again.
Turn what you have gathered into something of your own.
Nostos is software you run, not a service you rent. There is no account to create, and nothing of yours is held hostage if you stop using it.
Available now
Not yet available
Nostos Cloud does not exist yet. When it does, self-hosting stays free and fully supported — the paid option is convenience, never leverage over your own library.
Nostos is not built to make you read faster, collect more, or turn every page into data. It is built to give your reading somewhere to live — so you can return to books, ideas, and your own thoughts when they matter.
That principle decides the details. Nothing counts your streaks. Nothing interrupts a page. No feature exists to keep you in the application for longer than the reading itself takes.
Nostos is a shelf you choose, not an infinite content inbox. There is nothing to scroll, and nothing competing with the book you opened.
No notifications, no reading streaks, no timers, no confetti, no social badges. The software stays still until you pick up a book.
Nostos has no AI features today. If intelligent help is added, it will be optional and contextual — never a bar across the page, and never the reason the application exists.
Your books and audio sit on your disk as ordinary files, your notes as plain text, and the catalogue in one SQLite database you can copy, inspect, and keep for decades.
A quiet, self-hosted home for your reading life. Books, annotations, notes, and writing live together in one local application instead of being scattered across an e-reader, a notes app, and a folder of loose files.
Yes. It is free and open source under GPLv3, and you run it yourself. There is no account to create and no subscription to maintain.
Self-hosting means running Nostos on your own machine or server, which is what the project offers today. Nostos Cloud is a planned managed option for people who would rather not look after a server. It is not available yet.
On your own disk. Imported EPUBs, PDFs, and audiobooks are kept as ordinary files, and the catalogue lives in a single SQLite database you can copy or back up.
Yes. Add Book takes EPUB, PDF, TXT, MOBI, MP3, M4A, and M4B files by file picker or drag and drop. Each file is copied into your own storage, and the Add Book screen can also search Project Gutenberg and LibriVox for free public-domain titles.
The .NET 10 SDK and Node.js. Clone the repository, run the start command, and Nostos opens in your browser at a local address. Building the frontend once and serving it through the .NET host is a single command. Importing LibriVox audiobooks additionally needs ffmpeg, since sections are assembled into one M4B file.
Nostos is a web app you host yourself, so any browser that can reach it can open it, including one on the same network. There is no separate iOS or Android application, and reaching it from outside your network means exposing it the same way you would any other self-hosted service.
Yes. Audiobooks play inside Nostos with chapter navigation and a remembered position.
Yes. A physical book can be catalogued with its ISBN, publisher, and page count, with no file attached.
Yes. Reading, writing, and search run locally with no internet connection. Only the built-in book search reaches the network.
Your library is exportable in the plainest sense: books and audio are files on disk, notes are standard text, and the catalogue is a SQLite database. Nothing needs a proprietary converter.
Nostos runs on your hardware and sends no telemetry. Nothing leaves your machine unless you search an online catalogue.
Not today. There are no AI features in Nostos. The Concept Brain is a graph built from your own books and notes, not a language model reading over your shoulder. If intelligent help is added later, it will be optional, contextual, and off by default.
Yes, under GPLv3, with the complete source on GitHub. The Nostos name and the arch doorway mark are trademarks of Christian Gennari.
Free to self-host. Managed Nostos Cloud is planned for those who would rather not run a server.