Best Free OPDS Catalogs for iPhone & iPad (2026)

Quick answer: the free OPDS catalogs that served books on 2026-08-24 are Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search.opds/), Open Library over OPDS 2.0, Gallica and Ebooks libres et gratuits in French, four Japanese catalogs led by Aozora Bunko, Wolne Lektury in Polish and textos.info in Spanish. Standard Ebooks serves OPDS to supporters only. The Internet Archive bookserver, OAPEN, Feedbooks, the Hungarian MEK bookserver and ManyBooks are all still recommended elsewhere and none of them works. Add a working URL as a custom catalog in an OPDS reader on your iPhone or iPad.

How this list was tested

Every feed below was requested on 2026-08-24 with a browser user agent, following redirects, and then walked: entries counted, sub-catalogs followed until a downloadable file turned up. Only feeds that reached a real book are listed as working.

That last step is the point. A status code is not a test. Two of the dead feeds below answer 200 OK, one of them with a body of zero bytes, and one returns a valid catalog containing nothing. Checking for XML, the advice every other list gives, passes all of them.

New to this? Start with how to set up OPDS on iPhone and iPad, then come back for where to point it.

Catalogs that work in any language

Project Gutenberg is the one to add first: open, no login, and in justRead it is built in, so you can browse and search it without typing a URL.

Open Library is the closest thing to a replacement for the dead Internet Archive bookserver, run by the same organisation. It speaks OPDS 2.0, the newer JSON format, so it works only in readers that support 2.0.

Project Gutenberg in your own language

Barely any list mentions this: Gutenberg's OPDS search takes a language filter, so you can point your reader straight at the books in the language you read. Append ?query=l. and the two-letter code:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search.opds/?query=l.de

All of these returned a working feed on 2026-08-24. The counts matter, because some are very small:

That last row was corrected on 2026-08-31, and the correction matters more than it looks. These five feeds do return exactly one <entry>, which is why a script that counts entries reports one book. Open the entry and its title is No records found. It is a placeholder telling you the search matched nothing, and it carries no acquisition link. Counting entries is not enough; you have to read them.

Korean is the one language in that group with a real result, and the result is Korean-English Dictionary (Korean). One reference work.

So if you read Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Indonesian or Thai, Gutenberg has nothing for you at all, and if you read Korean it has a dictionary. No list advertising "70,000 free books" will tell you that.

French

Gallica has a trap worth knowing: it returns 403 to a plain HTTP client and 200 to a browser. If a script or a minimal reader says Gallica is down, it is the user agent, not the feed. Its catalog reached books one level below the root on 2026-08-24.

Japanese

Aozora Bunko Revised is HTTP only. The HTTPS address refuses the connection, so a reader that upgrades every URL to HTTPS fails on it. Tatsu-zine's full catalog was the largest feed tested here.

Other languages

ImWerden is a non-commercial library of Russian literature, poetry and periodicals, with 94 downloadable files one level below the root. The Russian OPDS catalogs that circulate most widely are book-piracy sites, and they are not on this page.

CBETA was added on 2026-08-31 and is the one catalog here that no other list carries. It is the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association's edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon, in Traditional Chinese, and it is a deep catalog rather than a flat one: the root lists 25 collections (大正藏, 卍續藏, 金藏, 高麗藏 and the rest), each collection opens into its volumes, and each volume lists its individual sutras. Walking root to 大正藏 to volume T02 gave 57 entries, every one of them carrying an application/epub+zip acquisition link, and downloading the first (T0099 雜阿含經) returned a valid 637 KB EPUB.

It has a trap of its own, and it is a new one. The acquisition URLs are written with HTML entities still escaped, so the link reads ...getData.php?type=ebooks_export&export_type=epub&work=T0099. A reader that hands that string to the server without decoding & back to & gets HTTP 200 and a zero-byte file. If a Buddhist text downloads as an empty book, that is why, and it is the client's bug rather than the catalog's.

We could not find and verify a working German, Italian, Dutch, Czech, Korean, Ukrainian or Turkish OPDS catalog. For those languages the Gutenberg language filter above is the honest answer, small as some of its collections are.

Supporters only: Standard Ebooks

Standard Ebooks gives public domain texts careful typography and proper covers. The books are free from the website, and most lists say its new-releases OPDS feed is open. It is not. https://standardebooks.org/feeds/opds, https://standardebooks.org/opds, /feeds/opds/all and /feeds/opds/new-releases all returned 401 Unauthorized on 2026-08-24. The catalog is reserved for supporters: the Patrons Circle, ebook producers, and qualifying open-source projects.

One public feed is worth knowing, https://standardebooks.org/feeds/atom/new-releases. It is plain Atom, not OPDS, and carries the fifteen newest books with rel="enclosure" links to EPUB, Kindle and Kobo files. Readers that follow Atom enclosures can download from it; readers that expect OPDS acquisition relations show fifteen titles and nothing to tap.

Feeds that have gone dark

Each of these is still published by other lists. Each was requested on 2026-08-24 and none returns a catalog you can read from. They are kept rather than deleted, because knowing what died is the part those lists cannot copy.

Internet Archive bookserver, https://bookserver.archive.org/catalog/. The host does not answer. Both the catalog path and the domain root time out with no response at all. The Archive's books are still alive; the bookserver in front of them is gone. Use Open Library instead.

OAPEN, https://library.oapen.org/opds. The most misleading entry here. Requested ten times, it answered 200 OK eight times with a body of exactly zero bytes, and 500 Internal Server Error twice. A reader shows an empty catalog and no error. OAPEN also publishes https://library.oapen.org/feed/atom_1.0/site, which returns content, but it is a DSpace site feed whose entries link only to HTML pages, with no ebook files.

Feedbooks, https://catalog.feedbooks.com/catalog/index.atom. Absorbed by Cantook. The old address serves a valid OPDS navigation feed titled "Cantook Market" with zero entries and no sub-catalog links.

Hungarian Electronic Library (MEK), https://bookserver.mek.oszk.hu. The one that rewards actually walking a catalog. The root is a healthy navigation feed with five sections and each section opens. Then every book listing underneath returns zero entries. Browsing works; there is nothing to browse.

ManyBooks, https://manybooks.net/opds/. Behind a Cloudflare challenge that returns 403 to anything short of a full browser, as does srv.manybooks.net, the address the MobileRead wiki still lists.

How to test a catalog yourself

Two checks, in this order:

1. Does it return a document? A working OPDS 1.2 feed is XML, usually a wall of tags. A 200 OK with an empty body, a redirect somewhere unrelated, or a parking page all mean the same thing as a 404.
2. Can you reach a file? Search the response for <entry. None means an empty shell. If there are some, open one sub-catalog and look for a link whose type is application/epub+zip or whose rel contains opds-spec.org/acquisition. That link is the book. MEK passes the first check and fails this one.

Does OPDS 1.2 vs 2.0 matter?

Only when a catalog offers just one. OPDS 1.2 is the XML version nearly every catalog and iOS reader speaks. OPDS 2.0 is the newer JSON version; Open Library is 2.0 only, and Komga offers both. When a server lists both, 1.2 is the safest default.

Build your own catalog

Public catalogs are for discovery. The real power of OPDS is pointing your iPhone at your own library:

• Calibre Content Server. If you keep your books in Calibre, it serves your whole library over OPDS at http://<your-ip>:8080/opds. See Calibre library sync for the two-way workflow that also writes reading progress and ratings back.
• calibre-web. A web front end for a Calibre library that exposes OPDS without leaving the Calibre desktop app open.
• Komga and Kavita. Self-hosted servers for comics, manga and ebooks, each with its own OPDS endpoint.

justRead connects to all of these as custom OPDS servers, with per-server filtering and pagination so a large catalog stays manageable on a phone. The OPDS reader page covers every supported server.

Putting it together

Mix one public catalog for discovery with your own server for the library you own: Project Gutenberg for the classics, the language-filtered feed if you read in something other than English, and your Calibre Content Server for everything you have collected. For the step-by-step, see how to set up OPDS on iPhone and iPad. If OPDS turns out to be more setup than you wanted, there are simpler places to get free EPUBs, and importing an EPUB without iTunes covers getting a downloaded file onto the device by hand. You can also browse all our reading guides.

Download justRead on the App Store and start with the built-in Project Gutenberg catalog.