Built by one person who kept not finishing books.
ReadKinetic is made by Esat Turan, a medical student in Istanbul. There is no company behind it, no team, and no investors. Just one developer who had a problem, built a tool to solve it, and decided to leave it free for everyone else with the same problem.
The problem I actually had
Medical school buries you in reading. Not the kind you savour — the kind you have to get through. Review articles, background chapters, forty pages of context before the five that matter. My downloads folder became a graveyard of things I started and never finished.
So I looked at speed reading tools. Every one I tried had the same shape of problem. Some locked me into their own library, so the book I actually needed to read was the one book I could not load. Others wanted an account before showing me anything. Several wanted a monthly subscription to flash words on a screen — a technique that has existed since the 1970s.
The one thing none of them would do was the simplest thing: read the file already sitting on my computer.
What I built instead
ReadKinetic uses RSVP — Rapid Serial Visual Presentation. Words appear one at a time in a fixed position, so your eyes stop jumping across the page. No saccades, no return sweeps, no backtracking over a line you already read.
You bring your own files — EPUB, PDF, DOCX, TXT, Markdown — or paste text straight in. Everything is parsed inside your browser. Your library and your reading position live in local storage on your device. There is no account, no server holding your books, and no record anywhere of what you read.
I never see your library. Not because I promise not to look, but because it never reaches me in the first place.
The principles it is built on
Local-first, permanently
Your files are processed in the browser and stored on your device. There is no backend that receives them. This is why there is no cross-device sync — I would have to hold your library to build it, and I am not willing to.
No accounts, ever
Not "no accounts for now." There will never be a login, because the moment there is one, there is a database of readers and a reason to look at it.
Free, with no version that isn't
There is no premium tier and no feature waiting behind a paywall. If you like it, there is an optional tip — it unlocks nothing, because there is nothing locked.
Honest about what it cannot do
RSVP is good for linear prose and bad for anything where layout carries meaning — tables, equations, reference material. Comprehension also degrades past roughly 500 WPM. So the app caps its useful range instead of advertising a number I do not believe.
Nothing in front of the words
The whole point of the format is that your eyes never move. Anything that appears near the word — a notification, a badge, an ad — undoes exactly the thing the reader exists to do. So the reader stays empty.
How it stays alive
ReadKinetic is free and the reader carries no advertising. Hosting is covered by an optional buy-me-a-coffee style tip that unlocks nothing at all, and by ads on these written articles — never inside the reading experience.
That is the entire business model. It is not designed to make me rich; it is designed to keep the app free without ever needing your data.
Where it is going
Development is driven almost entirely by people who email me. Since launching, readers have asked for the publisher's own typeface to be pulled out of their EPUBs, for books to open at chapter one instead of the copyright page, and for a per-book reading speed. All three are now built, because someone took the time to write.
If something about it annoys you, that is genuinely useful to me. Tell me.
Try it on a book you own
No signup, nothing to install, and it works offline once loaded.
Open ReadKinetic →