Importing ebooks and files

Your library holds what you put in it — ebooks, papers, lecture notes, scans. There is no built-in bookstore and nothing is pushed to you.

Supported formats

EPUB and PDF open directly. MOBI, AZW, AZW3, FB2, TXT, RTF, MD, DOC, DOCX, ODT and HTML are converted to EPUB on the server after upload; an item shows as "processing" until that finishes. The size limit is 500 MB per file.

How to import

1. Tap "Import" on the library page, or drag files straight onto it.

2. You can select several files at once. Bulk importing is easier on a computer; the library syncs to your phone afterwards.

3. Large files are uploaded in chunks, so a dropped connection resumes instead of starting over.

4. Files you import while offline are queued and uploaded automatically once you are back online.

Importing from other apps (phone)

An ebook you receive in WeChat, Mail, Files, a cloud-drive app or elsewhere can be handed straight to Athena: choose "Open in…" or "Share" in that app and pick Athena from the list. The file lands in Athena's upload sheet; tap "Start upload" and everything after that is identical to importing from the library. You need to be signed in and online — if you are not signed in, Athena takes you to the login first and continues the import afterwards. Supported formats are the same as the list above; for unsupported formats Athena simply does not appear in the system's "Open in" list.

What happens on a duplicate import

If the same file is already in your library, Athena recognises it. Importing it again consumes no extra quota and creates no second entry.

Checking titles and authors after a bulk import

Titles and authors are read out of the files themselves. Well-produced ebooks are usually accurate; scanned PDFs, files converted from other formats and self-packaged ones often miss them or get them wrong.

When you import several items at once, Athena does not interrupt you with a dialog for each one. Those items are marked as needing review — a small pencil badge on the top-right of the cover — and once the batch has been processed you get a notification that takes you straight to the review list. The "To review" button at the top of the library carries a count; tap it to see only those. When everything has been checked the count reaches zero and the button disappears on its own.

Importing a single file skips all of this: you are asked to confirm its title and author as soon as the upload finishes.

Three views, plus bulk tidy-up

The top-right of the library switches between grid, list and shelves. Shelves are groups you create; one item can sit on more than one shelf. An empty shelf tells you to create one from an item's menu.

Grid and list also have a filter for "AI activated / not activated", so you can find what you still cannot ask questions about. The shelf view does not take part in that filter.

The checkbox button turns on selection: tap a card to select or deselect it, and use "Select all" in the action bar. On a computer the bar sits at the top; on a phone it sits at the bottom. Once you have a selection there are three actions:

Shelf: put everything selected on a shelf, or take it all off. If some are already on that shelf and others are not, the shelf shows a partial state — tap once to add them all, tap again to remove them all.

Author: give every selected item the same author name, handy after importing a whole set by one writer.

Reviewed: confirm that the titles and authors are correct; the pencil badges disappear straight away.

Bulk actions only change the information in your library, never the files themselves, and the changes sync to your other devices.

Troubleshooting

Stuck on "processing": the server is converting the format. How long that takes depends on file size and complexity — read something else in the meantime; the library refreshes itself when it is done.

"Format not supported": check that the extension is in the list above. Files with DRM protection cannot be imported — that is the copy-protection mechanism, not an Athena limitation.

"File corrupted": the file itself is incomplete. Import a different copy.

"Quota exceeded": your library has hit the item count or storage limit of your current plan. See the pricing page and your account page for the exact allowances and how to upgrade; both show live data for your account.

Limits and notes

Scanned PDFs (pages that are images) contain no selectable text. Run text recognition (OCR) first to make them searchable, copyable and usable by the AI. Listening is the exception: OCR output always contains some misread characters, which would be read aloud as nonsense, so listening is offered for born-digital PDFs only.

What you import is accessible only to you. Athena never shares it with anyone and never uses it to train models.