Readlang EPUB, PDF and books: what you can upload, and how to read your own novels

What Readlang accepts

Readlang has an upload page, and it lists three ways to bring a text in. Paste text into a box and give it a title. Upload a plain text file, .txt. Or upload an EPUB, as long as it has no DRM. That is the whole list on the pages we checked on 14 September 2026; there is no mention of PDF, MOBI, AZW or DOCX.

The distinction that matters is DRM, not the file extension. An EPUB from Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks or a publisher that sells unlocked files uploads as it is. A file from a store that locks its books, Kindle being the usual case, is encrypted and will not open; more on that below.

Uploads are not a paid feature. The pricing page separates Free from Premium by phrase translations, AI explanations and audio, not by the number of books you add; the pricing page on this site goes through the plans line by line.

The shared library

If you have nothing of your own, Readlang has a shared library: community texts, filtered by the language you are learning. For the big languages there is a fair amount. For beginners, and for most languages outside the top handful, it is thin, the most consistent complaint about Readlang on Reddit and the review sites, and the reason "bring your own content" comes up whenever it is discussed. Our Readlang review collects those opinions.

Two things follow. Readlang leaves finding material at your level to you. And the library cannot contain the books people arrive here looking for, because those are under copyright. Which is why most regular users upload their own.

Uploading an EPUB, step by step

1. Check the file: a .epub with no DRM. A file from a locked store will not work; one from Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks or a DRM-free shop should.
2. Open the upload page, the same place where you paste text, choose the file option and pick the EPUB.
3. Wait for processing. Readlang reads the file into your library as a book with chapters.
4. Open it and look at the chapter list before you start. If the order or the formatting looks wrong, the next section is about that.
5. Read it as any text: click a word, select a phrase, let the flashcards collect. The tutorial covers that part.

For a single chapter or a short story there is a cruder route: copy the text and paste it. You lose the chapters and the cover, and you sidestep every EPUB parsing problem at once.

Known EPUB problems from the forum

EPUB is a loose standard, and the Readlang forum has a steady trickle of threads about files that did not come through cleanly. Four of them, with dates, so you can check whether your case matches. We read the threads; we did not test whether each has since been fixed.

• Upload broken in Brave (June 2024). EPUB upload failed in the Brave browser. If an upload silently does nothing, try the same file in Chrome or Firefox before blaming the file.
• Footnotes and superscripts (December 2024). How footnote markers and superscript numbers come through in an uploaded book. If a text reads oddly around numbers, that is the thread to check; a plain edition of the same book avoids the question.
• Chapters in the wrong order (March 2025). An uploaded EPUB whose chapters appeared out of sequence; the reason to look at the chapter list right after upload rather than three chapters in.
• Formatting broken by XML (April 2025). An EPUB whose internal markup came through as broken formatting. If paragraphs run together or tags show up in the text, that is the one to read.

None of these is a reason not to upload; they are the reason to check the first chapter and the chapter list before investing an evening.

What about PDF

PDF is not listed among the formats on the upload page, and we found no PDF import on the pages we checked. That fits what PDF is: a page layout format rather than a text format.

Two workarounds. For a short document, copy the text out of the PDF and paste it into Readlang. For a book-length PDF, convert it to EPUB or plain text first with a converter such as Calibre and upload the result. The conversion is only as good as the PDF: a scanned PDF has no text to extract, and a two-column layout may come out in the wrong order, so check the result.

Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and other copyrighted books

A large share of the searches that lead to this page name a specific book: readlang harry potter, readlang percy jackson, readlang about a boy. They are the books people read in a language they are learning, because they know the story and the prose is plain. People do read them in Readlang; the forum shows it.

None of them is in the Readlang library, and none is in the Readlang Mobile library, for the same reason: they are under copyright, and a shared library may only carry what may be shared. That is not a gap either product can fill. The question is how to get a copy you own into the reader.

If you have the novel as a DRM-free EPUB, bought from a store that sells unlocked files, it uploads to Readlang on any plan and to Readlang Mobile on Premium, and reads like any other book. If you have it as a Kindle purchase, it is locked. The forum says Kindle books need the DRM removed before Readlang can read them; whether and how you may do that is a legal question that depends on where you live and what you bought, and this page does not explain it.

Kindle: two different questions

Searches for "readlang kindle" mean one of two things.

Reading Readlang on a Kindle. No official support. Some people opened readlang.com in the experimental browser on the device, and a forum thread from March 2026, "Readlang not working on Kindle anymore?", reports that this stopped working. Treat it as unsupported.

Getting Kindle books into Readlang. Not as they are, because of DRM. Books you side-loaded onto the Kindle from DRM-free sources were never locked, and the same file uploads normally.

If the real question is how to read a foreign-language book with a translation one tap away, the Kindle page covers what the Kindle dictionary and translation panel do and where they stop.

Readlang Mobile: EPUB on Premium, a graded library for free

We make Readlang Mobile, and this is the disclosure: an independent native iOS app for iPhone and iPad, not affiliated with Readlang. Here is the same list for both.

Readlang from readlang.com and its upload page, 14 September 2026. Prices in USD.

The trade is plain. Readlang uploads on every plan and covers more than a hundred languages; Readlang Mobile puts EPUB upload behind Premium and covers about twenty. What you get for that is a free library where every book carries a level, a reader built for a phone rather than a website pinned to the home screen, and the option of Apple Translate on the device, which works offline once the language pack is downloaded. The download page explains the naming confusion in the App Store; the Readlang guide is the map of everything else; the YouTube and Netflix page covers the content it does not touch.

Questions people ask