Making a book for Reading Room

The short version

1. Put all your page images (JPEGs) in one folder.
2. Name them so they sort in reading order — e.g. page_001.jpg, page_002.jpg, …
3. (Optional) Add a metadata.json file for the title, author, and collections.
4. (Optional) Add a thumbnail.jpg for the cover.
5. Zip the folder and add it to Reading Room.

That's it. Everything below is detail and options.

1. Gather your pages

Each page of the book is a single JPEG image (.jpg or .jpeg). One image = one page.

Put every page image into a single folder. For example, a folder called the-secret-garden:

the-secret-garden/
├── page_001.jpg
├── page_002.jpg
├── page_003.jpg
└── …  (one image per page)

2. Name the pages so they're in order

Reading Room orders pages by the number in each filename, read smallest to largest. The rest of the name doesn't matter — page_, p, scan-, or no prefix at all all work.

These all order correctly:

• page_001.jpg, page_002.jpg, page_003.jpg
• 1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg
• scan-01.jpeg, scan-02.jpeg

3. (Optional) Add a title, author, and collections

By default, if you include nothing else, Reading Room names the book after the ZIP file (it cleans up the name — underscores and dashes become spaces, and words are capitalized). So the_secret_garden.zip becomes “The Secret Garden.”

To set the details yourself, add a small text file named exactly metadata.json inside the folder. Any field you leave out is simply left blank in the app.

A simple example:

{
  "title": "The Secret Garden",
  "author": "Frances Hodgson Burnett"
}

If a book has more than one author, or you want it filed under one or more collections, you can use lists instead:

{
  "title": "The Secret Garden",
  "authors": ["Frances Hodgson Burnett", "Charles Robinson (illustrator)"],
  "collections": ["Childhood Classics", "Illustrated"]
}

The fields you can use:

Field	What it does	Format
title	The book's title	Text in quotes
author	A single author	Text in quotes
authors	Several authors	A list of names
collection	A single collection to file it under	Text in quotes
collections	Several collections	A list of names

Use either author or authors (not both), and likewise either collection or collections. If a collection name doesn't exist yet, Reading Room creates it for you.

4. (Optional) Choose a cover

By default the first page becomes the cover. To use a different image, add a file named thumbnail.jpg (or thumbnail.JPG / thumbnail.jpeg) to the folder.

5. A complete example folder

the-secret-garden/
├── metadata.json        ← optional: title, author, collections
├── thumbnail.jpg        ← optional: cover image
├── page_001.jpg
├── page_002.jpg
├── page_003.jpg
└── …

6. Zip it and add it

• On a Mac: right-click the folder → Compress. You'll get the-secret-garden.zip.
• On Windows: right-click the folder → Send to → Compressed (zipped) folder.

Then get the ZIP onto your iPad in any of these ways:

• Files app: copy the ZIP into the Reading Room folder (under On My iPad).
• Cable: connect the iPad to your computer, open it in Finder, go to Files, and drag the ZIP onto Reading Room.
• Share sheet: from any app, choose Share → Open in Reading Room.

Reading Room notices new files automatically and adds the book to your library within a moment or two. You don't need to unzip anything yourself.

Quick troubleshooting

You can also add a single PDF or a single JPEG directly to the Reading Room folder — those work too. The ZIP format is for multi-page image books and is the only one that supports a title / author / collections file and a custom cover.