Beresta: Library & Highlights

Beresta keeps what you read and what you took from it: books, articles, highlights — and the notes they turn into.

BOOKS STAY FILES
Opens EPUB, FB2, PDF, MOBI and plain text. Importing copies: the file you brought stays where it was. Any book comes back out as a file under its real name through Share; on the Mac, "Save a copy of the library…" lays the whole library out as Author/Title folders. A book may hold several files at once — the reader picks the one that reads best, and you can pick another by hand.

HIGHLIGHTS YOU CAN TAKE WITH YOU
A quote, your own thought beside it, tags, bookmarks. On iPad, ink over PDF pages with Apple Pencil. All of it exports into an Obsidian vault as ordinary Markdown files rather than "our format": a person edits the note, not the program, and the next export will not overwrite what you wrote. There is a separate Obsidian plugin, open source.

SYNC WITHOUT SOMEONE ELSE'S SERVER
Beresta has no server of its own and no account. Devices exchange through a place you choose. To Backblaze B2 and WebDAV everything travels sealed: the key is derived from your passphrase on the device itself and stays with you. Through a folder — your own, a shared one, or one inside iCloud Drive — the files travel as they are: there the storage protects them, not Beresta, so pick a folder you trust.

A LIBRARY, NOT A FILE LIST
Authors, series, tags, nested shelves. Search by title and author everywhere; search inside the book you are reading, too; full-text search across the whole library on the Mac. Reading statuses and a reading log. On the Mac, import from Calibre brings covers and your own highlights along, and import from Zotero brings articles and notes.

ARTICLES FROM THE WEB
RSS subscriptions deliver articles straight into the library and store them the way books are stored: text, images and the original source. On the Mac a page can be clipped with the Safari extension — it ships inside the app, nothing to install.

ON ALL YOUR DEVICES
One purchase covers Mac, iPhone and iPad. Widgets: continue reading, and quote of the day. A nearby device offers to continue the book you started; if that is too much, one switch in settings turns it off.

WHAT BERESTA DOES NOT DO
No account. No analytics, no telemetry, and nothing leaves your device on its own. If something goes wrong, "Diagnostics" in Settings builds a report, shows it to you in full before anything is sent, and you decide whether to send it at all. No ads. It does not decide for you where your books live.

Keeping your own files is not about distrusting clouds. It is about libraries taking years to build, and apps living shorter lives than that.

A year of updates is included. After that you can extend for new features — or stay with what you bought: the app keeps working.