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Getting Started with Alcove

Alcove is a personal ebook library manager for Mac and iPad. It catalogs, organizes, and tags the ebooks you already own and keeps your library in sync via iCloud.

What Alcove Does

  • Catalogs your ebooks in one place, regardless of where you bought them
  • Organizes books with tags, ratings, reading status, and series information
  • Syncs your library across all your devices via iCloud
  • Reads EPUB and PDF books in its own reader, or opens them in the app of your choice
  • Cleans up messy metadata — duplicate tags and authors, missing series, untidy titles — with suggestions from AI that you review before anything changes

Alcove keeps your whole collection in one place, and you can read it there too: EPUBs and PDFs open in Alcove's reader, and any book can still open in Apple Books, Preview, or another app you prefer.

Alcove Plus, a subscription, adds the ISBNdb book database to lookups and covers, large batch lookups, and AI on devices without Apple Intelligence. Alcove Pro, a one-time purchase, removes the 50-book limit. Both are in the Alcove Store.

First Launch

When Alcove opens for the first time it creates a new default library and, if you're signed into iCloud, starts syncing it automatically.

If you prefer a local library (no iCloud sync), choose Library → New Library… on Mac or tap New Library in the Library Manager on iPad, and uncheck Sync via iCloud before creating it.

Where Your Books Are Stored

Alcove manages your books in its own private storage — you don't need to navigate to them in Finder or Files. When you import a book, Alcove makes its own copy; your original file is left exactly where it was.

To see the book count, total size, and sync status for the current library, choose Library → Show Library Info on Mac, or Library → Library Info from the ⋯ menu on iPad.

What's Next