A spoiler-free character list for your own ebooks

Yes, if the server is Quven. Quven is a self-hosted media server by Quven Technologies S.R.L., free for personal use, and its ebook reader has a Who is who panel that lists the people you’ve already met in the book you’re reading. It works on the books you own, on your own server, and it will never name anyone the book hasn’t introduced yet.

How does Quven know who you’ve met?

The server reads the text of each book once and keeps it. Then:

• a name counts as a person when it comes up at least three times, and often enough inside a sentence rather than only at its start, so a word capitalised only because it opens a sentence doesn’t slip in;
• every name remembers the paragraph where the book first uses it, and the panel lists only names first met at or before your place;
• the description is at most 240 characters of the book’s own sentence at that first appearance, so nothing in it could know the ending;
• you see six people at most, the most mentioned first, under the names you’ve seen them called so far.

Who decides that a capitalised word is really a character? Wikidata confirms the characters of a known work. Where it can’t, Quven’s managed AI picks the clause from that first sentence, and it’s told to use no outside knowledge and no later events. It quotes the book. It won’t write a summary, even though a summary would be easier to make.

How do I open it?

1. In the desktop app, choose Add library, set Library type to Books, press Add folder… and pick the folder that holds your ebooks, then Add and start scan.
2. Open a book and press Read.
3. In the reader’s toolbar, press Who is who. The panel answers for the page on screen.
4. On the book’s own page, the Who is who tab beside Contents and Marks answers for the place you last reached.

An EPUB or a Kindle file will do, and so will a PDF with a text layer. A comic or a scanned PDF carries no text the server can read, and neither does a file locked by DRM, so their panel stays empty.

Which other media servers do this?

	Quven	Plex	Jellyfin
Ebook library	Yes: EPUB, Kindle, PDF, comics	No: five library types, none for books	Yes: EPUB, MOBI, AZW, PDF, comics
Character list	Who is who, up to your page, in the reader and on the book’s page	No library to hold a book	None named on its Books page

Plex’s library overview, read on 21 October 2026, says a library has one of five types, and none of them is for books. Jellyfin’s Books page, read the same day, explains how to arrange the folders and which formats it takes, and it names no character list.

Where can I read with it?

The reader runs in the desktop app and in the web client at app.quven.tv, which comes with Pro. The mobile and television apps carry your films and series, documentaries and performances included. Each profile keeps its own reading position, so when your family shares the server (here’s how profiles and invitations work), every reader’s panel stops at their own page.

The same server holds your films and your music beside the books, as one library for every kind explains, and it shows no advertising on any plan.

Which plan includes it?

• The base ebook edition is free on every plan and never expires: the shelf and the reader, with the place you’ve reached kept for you.
• Who is who belongs to the advanced tools, with Max and Lifetime, beside private corrections and a measure of your reading speed.
• For a limited period every ebook edition is open to every plan, and the plans page gives the date that closes.

Lifetime is every Max capability for one payment, Who is who included, and its price rises at each step of the published schedule. The annual plan costs less than twelve months paid one at a time. If you’d like to weigh the two, this comparison of lifetime licences sets them side by side, and the server itself is one download away.

Frequently asked questions