SaveThenRead started as a tool for articles. Short-form, web-native content — the kind you save from X, Substack, or a blog, and want to read later without the surrounding noise.

But a lot of what people actually want to read isn't short. It's books. Long PDFs. Academic papers that run to 80 pages. EPUB files that have sat on your desktop for six months because you never found a good place to read them.

The app has supported EPUB and PDF imports for a while now. Today, reading them got significantly better.

What's New: Chapter Detection and the Contents Panel

When you import an EPUB, the app now extracts the chapter structure automatically. Each chapter's title is pulled from the file's heading tags, and the text is formatted so chapters are visually distinct — clear heading markers, not a wall of undifferentiated paragraphs.

For PDFs, it's a bit more heuristic. PDFs don't have a formal structure the way EPUBs do, so the app scans the text for lines that look like chapter headings — things like "Chapter 3", "PART TWO", "Introduction" — and promotes them to styled headings automatically. It's not perfect for every PDF, but for most books and reports it works well.

The result in both cases is the same: a Contents panel in the reader.

Click the Contents button in the top bar and a panel slides in listing every chapter. Click any chapter title and the reader scrolls straight to it. Close the panel and you're back reading. That's the whole feature.

Why This Matters for Long-Form Reading

The problem with reading a 300-page book in a web reader isn't the reading — it's the navigation. If you close the tab and come back tomorrow, you need to find your place. If you want to jump back to a specific section, you're scrolling. If the document has no visual structure, every page looks the same.

Chapter headings solve the visual structure problem. The Contents panel solves the navigation problem. Together they make the difference between an app that can technically open a book and one that's actually comfortable to read a book in.

Everything Else Still Works

The reader features that exist for articles apply to books too: the focus reader mode, text-to-speech, AI chat on any passage, annotations and highlights, reading progress tracking, adjustable font and theme. None of that changes. Books just now get a proper table of contents on top of it.

How to Try It

Import any EPUB or PDF via the dashboard — drag and drop, or use the import button. If the file has more than one chapter, the Contents button will appear automatically in the reader header. No settings to configure.

If you have books sitting in your imports that were added before today, re-importing them will pick up the new chapter structure.