Privacy Policy

Effective date: October 16, 2026

This policy explains what the Plainread app for macOS ("Plainread", "the app") reads, what it stores, and what it never does. Plainread is made by Victor Shammas, an independent developer ("I", "me").

1. What Plainread reads

Plainread runs in Apple's App Sandbox, so the app can only open books you give it: by double-clicking them, dragging them onto the app, or choosing them in File › Open.

Source	What is read	Why
Books you open	The EPUB book itself: its text, images, fonts and styles	To show it to you.
Books previewed with Quick Look, or shown in Finder	The book you press Space on, or whose icon Finder draws	To show the preview, and the cover as the book's icon.
Books indexed by Spotlight	Each EPUB that Spotlight hands to Plainread's importer: its title, author, publisher, language, description and text	So that Spotlight can find words inside your books. The importer runs inside macOS's own Spotlight indexing, on your Mac, and what it reads goes only into your Mac's Spotlight index. Plainread doesn't keep a copy.

Plainread never changes your books.

2. What Plainread stores on your Mac

• Your reading settings: typeface, text size, line width, alignment, theme, publisher styles, citation style, whether the table of contents is shown, and window size.
• Your place in each book: which chapter and how far into it, for up to 500 books, so each one opens where you left it. Books are recognised by the identifier and title inside them.
• The Recently Read list: up to 10 recent books, saved as macOS bookmarks so they can be reopened from the menu. File › Recently Read › Clear Recently Read empties it.

All of this is kept in Plainread's sandbox container on your Mac. None of it is sent anywhere.

3. Network use

Plainread makes no network connections of its own. Pages of a book can only load the book's own files: a web address inside a book (for an image, a font or a script) is blocked, and books can't run scripts at all. Clicking a web or email link in a book opens it in your browser or mail app, not in Plainread.

(Like any Mac app that shows web content, Plainread is allowed by macOS to use the network, because the system's web engine needs it to run. Plainread uses it for nothing.)

4. What Plainread never does

• No accounts or sign-in.
• No analytics, telemetry, crash-reporting services, advertising or tracking SDKs.
• No servers run by me. Nothing is uploaded to me or to any third party on my behalf.
• No selling or sharing of data, because I don't have any of your data.
• No tracking across apps or websites.
• No attempt to remove copy protection (DRM) from books.

5. Apple

You buy and download Plainread through the Mac App Store. Apple processes your purchase under Apple's Privacy Policy. Apple may share anonymous sales and, if you opt in to sharing with developers, crash statistics with me. These never include your books.

6. Removing your data

• To clear the Recently Read list, use File › Recently Read › Clear Recently Read.
• To remove everything, delete Plainread from Applications, then delete its container folder ~/Library/Containers/com.victorshammas.plainread and the ones whose names begin with com.victorshammas.plainread. (for the Quick Look and Finder icon extensions). macOS keeps these folders when you delete an app.

7. Children

Plainread is rated 4+. It collects no personal information from anyone, including children.

8. Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the new version will be posted on this page with a new effective date. If a change ever adds data collection, it will be announced in the app's release notes before it takes effect.

9. Contact

Questions about privacy? Email contact+plainread@victorshammas.com.