Ingest — Summarize books on your Mac, privately

Not a three-sentence blurb

Ingest reads a book in chapter-sized pieces, then builds a structured summary you can actually navigate.

Chapter-by-chapter depth

A full synopsis, per-chapter breakdowns, recurring themes, key takeaways and notable quotes — each traceable to where it came from.

Ask the book

Ask anything and get an answer grounded in the actual text, with the chapters it drew from shown beneath — so you can check it rather than trust it.

Search everything you've read

One search across your whole library. Find which book discussed an idea, and jump straight to the chapter it appeared in.

Scanned pages too

A PDF with no text layer isn't a dead end. Ingest can recognise the text directly from the page images, on demand.

Pick your depth

Brief, standard or in-depth — and switch after the fact. Ingest reuses the analysis it already did, so rewriting a summary takes seconds.

Yours to keep

Copy any summary as Markdown or export it to a file. Everything is stored locally, in formats you can take elsewhere.

How it works

Drop in a book

PDF, EPUB or MOBI. Ingest finds the chapter structure automatically, whether that comes from bookmarks, the spine, or the page layout itself.

It reads, section by section

The book is split along chapter boundaries and summarized in passes, then combined into one coherent whole. Progress is shown throughout, and interrupted runs resume where they stopped.

Then you can interrogate it

Switch to Ask and question the book directly. Short works are held in full; longer ones retrieve the passages that matter to what you asked.

Choose a model to match your Mac

Downloaded once, then reused. Bigger models write better summaries and need more memory.

Model	Download	Memory	Best for
Gemma 4 E2B	3.6 GB	8 GB	Fastest summaries, smallest footprint
Gemma 4 E4B Recommended	5.2 GB	16 GB	The balance most Macs should start with
Gemma 4 12B	6.8 GB	24 GB	Noticeably deeper analysis
Gemma 4 26B	15.4 GB	32 GB	Near-flagship quality, moderate speed
Gemma 4 31B	18.4 GB	48 GB	The strongest, on high-memory Macs

Worth knowing before you download

The first launch downloads a language model — several gigabytes, once. Ingest suggests a size based on your Mac's memory.
Summarizing a full-length book takes minutes, not seconds, because the work happens on your machine rather than in a datacentre.
MOBI support covers classic MOBI files. Newer Kindle formats (KF8/AZW3) are declined with a clear message rather than producing garbage — converting to EPUB with Calibre works.
Requires Apple silicon. Ingest uses the GPU on M-series chips, so Intel Macs aren't supported.

Read the whole book.
In about five minutes.

Your books never leave your Mac