Export your data

Download everything your family has made, and what happens to it when a subscription ends.

This page is readable without signing in, on purpose — if your subscription has ended and the app is asking you to subscribe, you can still read how to get your data out.

Everything your family has made in Zen Reader can be downloaded as a single .zip file, at any time, for free. Go to zenreader.co/export and sign in with the email address you use for Zen Reader.

On a computer the app links you straight there. On an iPhone or iPad there may be no link in the app, so open zenreader.co/export in a browser instead — it is the same page and the same archive.

What you get

One folder containing:

• Spreadsheets (.csv) for every part of the portfolio — reading sessions and their scores, spelling sessions and the individual words, word-list tests, flash-card sessions, homework pages, school marks you recorded, badges, your readers, and your whole library. They open in Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets or LibreOffice.
• Every recording your children made, as .opus audio files — including the original of any recording you trimmed, and the flash-card recordings.
• Every photo and scan — spelling sheets, homework pages, book covers, and the pages of the books you added.
• A README.txt explaining the columns, and a media-index.csv that maps every audio file and photo back to the session it came from.

Files are named so they sort and search sensibly — the date, your family, the reader, what it is, and the book or list. For example:

2026-08-17_The-Tan-Family_Theodore_reading_Journey-to-the-West.opus

Only the Family Manager can export

The archive contains every reader's recordings and work, so it is not something a single reader or a second parent can take on their own. If you are not the Family Manager, ask them to run the export.

It is built on your own computer

Nothing is uploaded anywhere and no copy is left on our servers waiting for you. Your browser downloads your files directly and writes the zip straight to your disk, so a large library is no problem.

Chrome and Edge write the file as they go, which is steadier for a big export. Firefox and Safari have to build it in memory first. For a very large library that will not work at all, so the page blocks the download and asks you either to untick the scanned book pages — usually most of the size — or to open the page in Chrome or Edge. Below that size it just warns you.

Before it starts, the page tells you how big the archive will be and how many files of each kind are going into it, so there are no surprises.

A large export can take a while. Leave the tab open until it says it is done. If you cancel part-way, delete the part-written file — it is not a usable export, and a truncated zip on your disk looks exactly like a finished one.

If a file cannot be downloaded

The export does not give up. Anything it could not fetch is listed in a MISSING.txt inside the zip, and everything else still downloads. If that file appears and you need what is in it, email hello@zenreader.co and quote the list.

What happens when a subscription ends

If your subscription or free period ends and is not renewed, we keep your family's data for three months from that date. During that time:

• you can still sign in at zenreader.co/export and download everything, exactly as above;
• we email the Family Manager three times — when the subscription ends, a month before the deadline, and a week before it — and every message names the exact date;
• subscribing again stops the deletion, and everything is exactly as you left it.

After that date we delete the family's data from our live systems and it cannot be recovered. Copies inside encrypted backups are purged on our normal backup rotation.

If you would rather we deleted everything sooner, you can ask at any time — see delete your account.