Hey everyone!

If you’ve been following along, you know that HandyReader 1.16 just shipped with OPDS online library support. Suddenly, you can browse and download thousands of free books directly inside the app.

But here’s the thing—once the feature was working, I had to actually test it. So I went down the rabbit hole of public OPDS catalogs. I tried every list I could find, poked at endpoints in a terminal, plugged them into HandyReader, and tried to break them in real-world conditions.

What I ended up with is a tested list of 15 public OPDS catalogs, sorted into honest tiers—from the ones I pre-installed in HandyReader because they just work, to the ones you should probably skip. No sugar-coating. If something has a catch, I’ll tell you.

I’m sharing this list for two reasons. First, to save you the headache I went through. Second, because I think OPDS is one of the most underappreciated ideas in e-reading—and the more people who use it well, the more pressure there is for catalogs to stay healthy and open.

Let’s get into it.

The Quick Reference

If you’re short on time, here’s the whole list at a glance. Details and caveats below.

A quick note on what “tier” means here: it’s about how reliably the catalog works for a typical reader, not a judgment on the books themselves. A niche Polish library is every bit as legitimate as Project Gutenberg—it’s just a different audience.

Recommended (Install and Go)

These four are the ones I pre-configured inside HandyReader 1.16. Open the app, and they’re already there. No setup, no fuss.

Project Gutenberg

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search.opds/

• Language: English (with translations)
• Catalog size: 75,000+ public-domain ebooks

The granddaddy of them all. If you’ve ever read a free classic ebook, there’s a good chance it came from here. The OPDS feed is stable, the metadata is clean, and you’ll find everything from Jane Austen to obscure 19th-century scientific papers. My one caveat: occasional download failures on specific titles. Retry usually works.

Pre-installed in HandyReader.

ManyBooks

https://manybooks.net/opds

• Language: English
• Catalog size: 50,000+ ebooks

A solid all-rounder. The genre browsing experience is great if you like discovering things by mood. I’ve seen occasional slowness and a bad request here and there, but nothing fatal. Worth having alongside Gutenberg for the broader selection.

Pre-installed in HandyReader.

Gallica (BnF)

https://gallica.bnf.fr/opds

• Language: French (with multilingual holdings)
• Catalog size: Millions of digitized items

Run by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, this is a treasure trove. Anonymous access works, no rate limits I could trip, and the depth is honestly staggering—manuscripts, periodicals, historical maps, the works. Even if you don’t read French, it’s worth poking around for the visual material alone.

Pre-installed in HandyReader.

Unglue.it

https://www.unglue.it/api/opds/

• Language: English
• Catalog size: 25,000+ Creative Commons ebooks

My personal favorite for one reason: every book here is genuinely free under a Creative Commons license. No “free with ads,” no “free for the first 30 days,” no gray area. The catalog is fast, search works well, and you’ll find a lot of academic and indie-published work that doesn’t show up on Gutenberg.

Pre-installed in HandyReader.

Worth a Look (Quality, With Caveats)

These are catalogs I tested and liked, but for one reason or another didn’t pre-install. Usually because they serve a narrower audience, have a paywall, or require a bit more patience.

文渊阁 (Wenyuange)

https://wenyuange.org/opds/

• Language: Chinese
• Catalog size: ~24,000 ebooks

If you read Chinese, this is your Gutenberg. The catalog leans heavily on Chinese public-domain classics and modern free literature. Response time is acceptable, and it’s the single best Chinese-language OPDS source I’ve found. The reason it’s not pre-installed in HandyReader yet is purely logistical—I’m still working through how to surface language-specific catalogs in the UI. It’s coming.

Standard Ebooks

https://standardebooks.org/opds/all

• Language: English
• Catalog size: 1,000+ carefully produced ebooks

This is the place to come for typographic quality. Every book is hand-formatted with attention to layout, typography, and proofreading. The catch: the full OPDS feed requires a donation to the project. The free portion is smaller but still usable. If you care about how your ebooks look, this is worth supporting.

OpenEdition

https://opds.openedition.org/

• Language: French and other European languages
• Catalog size: Large academic collection

An open-access academic platform—books and journals in the humanities and social sciences. The catalog itself is high-quality, but I ran into intermittent rate limiting and the occasional human-verification challenge. Stability is uneven. When it works, it’s excellent for serious readers.

arXiv (via Maplepop Proxy)

http://arxiv.maplepop.com/catalog/

• Language: English
• Catalog size: Massive (STEM preprints)

arXiv itself needs no introduction—the world’s largest preprint server for physics, math, CS, and friends. Important caveat: arXiv’s official API at https://export.arxiv.org/api/query is NOT an OPDS feed and will fail if you add it as one. The URL above is an unofficial OPDS proxy maintained by Maplepop, and it’s the only way to browse arXiv from an OPDS client that I’ve found working reliably. Rate limiting can be aggressive.

Textos.info

https://textos.info/opds

• Language: Spanish
• Catalog size: ~3,500 ebooks

A Spanish-language library focused on classical Hispanic literature. Small but well-maintained, and the OPDS endpoint behaves correctly. If Spanish is your reading language, this fills a gap the larger English catalogs can’t.

Ebooks Gratuits

https://www.ebooksgratuits.com/opds/

• Language: French
• Catalog size: A few hundred ebooks

A modest French free-ebook site. The catalog is small—only a few hundred titles—but the quality is consistently good, and the OPDS feed is rock-solid. A nice complement to Gallica if you want curated picks rather than the firehose.

Language-Specific: Wolne Lektury

https://wolnelektury.pl/opds/

• Language: Polish
• Catalog size: Large Polish literature collection

I’m calling this out separately because it doesn’t fit neatly into the tiers above. Wolne Lektury is a Polish digital library with a well-maintained OPDS feed, focused on Polish literary classics. If you read Polish, it’s a fantastic resource. If you don’t, you can safely move on. The reason I include it: every reader matters, and a list that pretends only English and French exist isn’t honest.

Tinkerer’s Only: Wikisource

https://en.wikisource.org

• Language: Multilingual (one URL per language edition)
• Catalog size: Massive

Wikisource is wonderful in principle—a free library of source texts maintained by volunteers. In practice, the OPDS experience is rough. Cloudflare’s bot detection regularly blocks OPDS clients, and once you get through, much of the content is metadata plus raw text rather than a polished ebook. If you’re comfortable troubleshooting and really need primary sources, give it a shot. Otherwise, stick to Gutenberg.

Skip These (And Why)

I tested these so you don’t have to. They’re listed here for completeness and honesty—not as recommendations.

The Anarchist Library

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/opds

Technically functional OPDS feed, but the catalog is narrowly focused on anarchist political and philosophical writings. Perfectly legitimate, just too specialized for a general reader looking for, well, books. If this is your lane, you already know about it.

Flibusta

http://flibusta.is/opds

A large Russian-language ebook library with serious copyright problems. It’s actively blocked by ISPs in Russia and several other regions. Even setting aside the legal question, accessibility is unreliable depending on where you live. I’m not linking this as a recommendation—I’m listing it so you know I tested it and chose not to recommend it.

lib.rus.ec

https://lib.rus.ec/opds

Listed in many OPDS roundups, but in my testing the endpoint’s status was inconsistent at best. Same copyright concerns as Flibusta. I would not depend on this.

How to Use These in HandyReader

If you’re reading this on the HandyReader blog, you’ve already got the easiest path. In HandyReader 1.16:

1. Open the app and head to the online library section.
2. The four Recommended catalogs above are already there—just tap one to start browsing.
3. To add any of the others, tap the add catalog button, paste the URL, give it a name, and save.
4. Browse, download, read.

That’s it. No accounts, no syncing to a cloud service you don’t trust, no ads inserted into your reading. Just books.

Who Are You? (Quick Recommendations)

Still not sure where to start? Here are some shortcuts:

• You just want free English classics. Use the four pre-installed catalogs. Done.
• You read Chinese. Add 文渊阁. Pair it with Gutenberg for the translations.
• You read French. Gallica plus Ebooks Gratuits covers most of what you’ll want.
• You read Spanish. Add Textos.info.
• You read Polish. Add Wolne Lektury.
• You’re an academic. Add the arXiv proxy and OpenEdition.
• You care about typography above all else. Standard Ebooks, and consider donating.
• You want primary sources for research. Try Wikisource, but expect friction.

A Quick Note on Scope

A few things this list isn’t:

• It’s not a content review. I tested catalogs, not individual books. Whether a specific translation of War and Peace is good is a separate question.
• It’s not exhaustive. There are OPDS catalogs I’m sure I missed. If you know a good one, please tell me.
• It’s not static. Catalogs change—endpoints move, rate limits tighten, new ones appear. I’ll update this post when something material changes.

The tests were done in late May and early June 2026. If you’re reading this a year from now, check the comments or the latest revision before assuming everything still works.

Tell Me What I Missed

If you maintain an OPDS catalog I should know about, or if one of the URLs above breaks, or if you’ve got a favorite I missed—please tell me. The best way to reach me is through the HandyReader feedback page, or email [email protected]. I read everything, even if I can’t reply to all of it.

Get HandyReader

If you found this list useful and haven’t tried HandyReader yet, maybe give it a shot. It’s free, it’s open-source-adjacent (the Android app is proprietary but built on open formats and standards like OPDS), and it works with any OPDS catalog—not just the ones I pre-installed.

• Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wxn.reader
• GitHub Releases: https://github.com/EucWang/HandyReader/releases

Happy reading.