Reading client for the decentralized MetaMesh network — comics and manga, books, papers and scanned documents. The third client after MetaWatch (video) and MetaListen (audio), built the same way.

What's in the stack

Self-contained (mirrors packages/meta-read/dev/). It does not depend on the standalone MetaCore app — it ships its own infra so it runs alongside MetaGateway and the other Meta* apps with no collisions:

container	role
`metaread-core`	identity keystore, User Data Layer op-log, ingested records
`metaread-search`	discovery — federated search, gateway fan-out, cover recovery
`metaread-share`	pure content transport — byte Range, bitswap, BitTorrent
`metaread-app`	the reader UI/back-end
`metaread`	AppShield/OIDC gate (plus `metareadshare`, `metareadsearch` for the peer chips)

⚠ Host ports 4005 / 4006. MetaWatch already publishes 4003/4004. Two peers cannot share a host port; walk the pairs upward for further clients.

The reading model

The depth of the hierarchy is a property of the item, not of the app. A manga is work → volume → chapter, with several scanlations per chapter and a chooser between them. A Gutenberg novel is one work and one file — its page is the reader entry point, and no synthetic chapter 1 is invented to pad it.

Page decoding (CBZ, CBR, EPUB, PDF) happens in the browser. The server is a flat Range/206 byte proxy and never unpacks an archive on your behalf.

It needs a feeder

MetaRead holds no catalogue. An empty library is the honest state of a mesh nobody has fed, not a fault. Install alongside MetaGateway plus:

MetaFeeder · Suwayomi (+ MetaFeeder · AniList) — for comics and manga
MetaFeeder · Gutenberg — Project Gutenberg (+ Open Library cards), for public-domain books

and register each feeder in the gateway's config. Gateway feeder discovery is startup-only.