How can we help?

Getting started

When you first open Kaishu, a short welcome tour walks you through the main ideas. You then pick a first book from three sample stories — they go from easy to harder — and a quick coach shows you the tap-to-define gesture right in the live reader.

Everything works offline from the start. The dictionary is built in, so there’s nothing to sign up for and nothing to download before you can read.

Adding books

There are three ways to add a book to your library:

• Import a file. Open an ePub (.epub), plain text (.txt), or HTML (.html) file and choose Kaishu from the share sheet. You can also import from Files, or drag a file in.
• Paste text. Paste any Chinese text to create a new book from it.
• Add a sample. Choose from the bundled sample stories — famous tales retold in simple Chinese.

You can sort your shelf by recently added, title, or recently read; show it as a grid or a list; drag to reorder; and search by title or author. Edit a book’s title, author, cover image, and recorded reading time, or delete it. Importing the same book twice is detected as a duplicate.

Tap to translate

Tap any character in the text. A small tooltip appears next to it with the pinyin (with tone marks), the traditional form when it differs, and the English definitions. Kaishu finds the longest phrase that matches, so the character you tap can sit at the start, the middle, or the end of the phrase.

Tap the plus button in the tooltip to save a word; tap it again to remove it. Look-ups use the CC-CEDICT dictionary, which is bundled with the app for offline use.

Supported formats

• ePub (.epub), plain text (.txt), and HTML (.html).
• PDF is not supported. Kaishu is built for reflowable text, so you can change the size and the layout adapts.
• Encoding is detected automatically — UTF-8, GB18030 (simplified), and Big5 (traditional) are all recognized.

Reading & your place

A book scrolls in one continuous flow. Open the chapter list to jump to a part of the book, or to one of your named bookmarks. Jump to a chapter or bookmark and a banner appears that returns you to your previous spot with one tap.

Your position is saved as a character index, so it’s preserved when you change the text size, and when you close and reopen the app. You can change the background (paper, sepia, or dark), the text size, and the line spacing (tight, normal, or loose) while you read.

Reading timer & stats

The timer counts active reading time. It starts when you interact and pauses when you are idle. It does not run in the background, and you can adjust the recorded reading time for a book by hand.

See your reading time by day, week, and month — each period shows the total, the average, and the all-time total. Read the trend chart and tap a bar to compare it with your average. Open the session log to see every reading session (you can hide sessions shorter than two minutes), and set the first day of your week.

Home-screen widget

Add the widget in three sizes — small, medium, and large. Choose the books and the time period it shows. Tap a book on the widget to open it in the reader, and see your reading time for the period at a glance. The widget follows the accent color you pick in the app.

Saved words & history

History logs every word you look up, grouped by day and newest first. Look up a word again and it moves back to the top. Save a word from the tooltip to keep it in Saved, tap a word to read its full entry again, and remove words one by one or clear the list.

Appearance & themes

Pick from six accent colors — indigo, jade, cinnabar, plum, gold, and slate. The same color carries through the app and your home-screen widget. Choose a reader background of paper, sepia, or dark, and set the text size and line spacing for each book.

Want the welcome tour again? Replay it from Settings at any time. Your books and your words are kept.

Something else?

We’re glad to help. Email support@kaishu.app and tell us what’s going on — the more detail, the better. We read every message.