Six settings, and when each one is
the right one — plus yours.
The reader has about thirty controls, which is thirty chances to configure yourself into a worse session. A preset is a set of them with a reason attached. Pick a book, pick one of these, and the reader opens already configured — you can still change anything once you are in there. The same six sit in a picker inside the reader itself, and when you land on a setup worth keeping, Save current… next to that picker turns it into a preset of your own. Anything you save appears here, beside these.
Every preset above is a link with the settings in it, so you can bookmark one. Presets you save yourself are stored on this device, like everything else about your reading — there is no server for them to go to. The pace figures assume you have a verified ceiling from the pace-tolerance drill — if you do not, treat Steady read as the honest starting point and work outward.
Tens of millions of records.
Not tens of millions of books you can read.
The free-book directories are not equivalent, and the difference is the whole reason this page badges every tile. All four numbers below are real and are read live from the directories where they publish one. Quoting only the biggest of them would be marketing.
Complete, and already here
Forty-two whole books ship with the app — not extracts, the full text — written into web/books/ at build time and served by the same server as this page. Nothing can block them, no directory has to be up, and once you have opened one it stays readable with the network off. They are also pre-cut into graded passages for the gym.
Read now
The full text is retrievable from the directory itself, so the book opens in the reader and its prose can feed a drill. Project Gutenberg, Wikisource and Standard Ebooks. Far smaller than the catalogue number, and the one that actually matters.
Scanned — case by case
The Internet Archive's texts. Millions are public domain and free to take; millions more are lending-only. There is no honest percentage to quote, because whether a given scan is free is a fact about that scan — so we ask when you open it, and the tile tells you the answer.
Catalogue
We can find it, tell you it exists and link you to it. Open Library and OpenAlex are almost entirely this. Useful for deciding what to read. Useless for reading it here, and labelled as such on every tile rather than discovered after a click.
Where these books come from.
Each one is queried straight from your browser. Nothing is proxied through us, because there is no us to proxy through — no server, no account on our side, no record anywhere of what you searched for. The trade is that a directory having a bad day shows up here as a red dot rather than something we can fix.
A big catalogue is not a reading habit.
Ten million records is a fact about six directories, not an achievement of ours, and access to more books has never been the thing standing between anybody and reading more. The number is here because the alternative — showing you a search box and letting you discover the limits by hitting them — wastes more of your time. What actually helps is the badge on each tile telling you, before you click, whether this is a book or a link to a book.
Project Gutenberg does not send the header a web page needs in order to fetch its files, and neither does any mirror on its official list — we checked all seven. That is why the forty-two books on the shelf are built into the site instead of fetched from it: tools/build_shelf.py downloads them once, at build time, and writes them into web/books/, where no cross-origin rule applies. For Gutenberg titles we do not ship, the reader tries Wikisource and the Internet Archive, both of which do allow it; where neither has the book, the desktop and Android apps can fetch it directly and the browser cannot. That last case says so on the book itself, with a working link, rather than spinning forever.
Copyright status is reported as each directory reports it. Public domain is a per-country judgement and these catalogues are largely written from a United States position, so a book that is free where the server is may not be free where you are. Nothing here is legal advice.
Pick something.
Read it faster.
The shelf that ships with the app needs no network and no account — whole books, not extracts, served from this site so nothing can block them. Open one in the reader, or send it to the gym and do your next drill on Dickens instead of on our house passages.