Guide
Is there an EPUB reader for Mac where you can ask AI about the page you are on?
Most EPUB readers have no AI, and most AI tools are not readers — you paste the book into a chat and lose the book. Here is what an EPUB reader with a built-in discussion layer looks like on a Mac, and what it deliberately does not do.
There are two piles of software and neither one is what you want.
In the first pile: EPUB readers. Apple Books, Calibre's viewer, a dozen small ones. They are good at reading and have no AI at all — when you hit a paragraph you do not follow, you are on your own or you are in a browser tab.
In the second pile: AI tools that accept a file. You upload the EPUB, and what comes back is a chat window. The book is gone. You are no longer reading; you are interviewing something about a text you can no longer see.
What is missing is the obvious middle: a reader where the book stays a book, and you can ask about the paragraph in front of you without leaving the page.
What "EPUB reader with AI" should mean
The text still reflows properly. EPUB is not PDF — it is meant to adapt to your window and your font size. A reader that turns it into a wall of extracted plain text has thrown away the point of the format.
You can point at something. Select a sentence, ask about that sentence. Not "summarize chapter 4", which any tool can do badly.
The answer is anchored to your book. With well-known books this is where things quietly go wrong: a model can produce a fluent answer about a novel from what it absorbed about the novel. In Resage, when a claim is presented as coming from the text, it comes with the passage; when it is drawing on general knowledge instead, it says so.
It remembers you, not just the file. Chapter 12 should be explained in light of what confused you in chapter 3. See what a reader that remembers looks like.
Reading an EPUB in Resage
Drag the file in and it opens as a book — reflowed to your window, with the reading typefaces the app ships with rather than a system fallback.
The discussion bar sits at the bottom and stays out of the way. Select a sentence and a Discuss pill appears next to it; ask, and the passage goes with the question.
Run a Digest when you want to ask about the whole book. Resage reads the file through locally on your Mac; afterwards, questions can span the book from any page — "where does she first change her mind about him" — and the answer points to where.
Search covers both sides at once: the text of the book, and your own past discussions about it. That second half turns out to matter more than it sounds, because six weeks later the thing you want back is usually the explanation, not the sentence.
Not agreeing with you is a feature
The failure mode that ruins AI reading tools is not ignorance. It is agreeableness — you propose something wrong about the plot and it builds on your premise.
We test for exactly this. Our regression set runs real questions against public-domain books, and several are deliberately false premises: "Why does Elizabeth end up marrying Mr. Collins?" (she does not), "The book says Ahab survives the final chase, right?" (he does not). A passing answer corrects the premise and shows where the text says otherwise. A failing answer politely invents a reason.
That set is the reason this page can promise grounding at all, and it is why the promise stays narrow: answers are anchored to your text, and uncertainty is stated rather than smoothed over.
Which files open
PDF, EPUB, Word, TXT and Markdown, plus DRM-free Kindle files — MOBI and AZW3. DRM-protected purchases cannot be opened by any third-party reader, and Kindle print replica (.azw4) files cannot be imported. More on that in opening MOBI and AZW3 on a Mac.
Where it stops
- macOS 14.0 or later on Apple Silicon. iPhone is next. No Windows, Android or web version.
- Not a library manager. No metadata editing, no format conversion, no device sync. Calibre does that job.
- Not a note vault. No highlight export, no Obsidian sync.
- No text-to-speech. Not on the roadmap.
- Discussion needs a connection. Reading, search, Digest and text recognition run on your Mac and work offline.
FAQ
Can I ask about the whole book, or only the visible page?
Both, in that order. Before a Digest, answers stay anchored to the passage you are reading. After a Digest — Resage reading the file through locally — questions can span the whole book from any page.
Does the EPUB stay properly formatted?
Yes. EPUB reflows to your window with adjustable size, using the reading typefaces the app ships with. PDFs, by contrast, are kept in their original fixed layout.
Is my book uploaded?
No. The file stays on your Mac and in your own iCloud. Only the few passages needed to answer a question are sent, and they are used only to answer it. Your content is never used to train models.
How is this different from NotebookLM or ChatGPT with a file attached?
Those are research and chat tools that accept a document; Resage is a reader first, and it keeps a private learner model that carries across books instead of starting from zero each session. Longer comparisons: vs NotebookLM, vs ChatGPT.
What does it cost?
Free to start, with a weekly discussion allowance. Importing, reading, Digest and text recognition are never metered. Resage Plus is $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year and raises the discussion allowance.