Everything new,
newest first.

Opening the reader on a slow connection used to mean staring at a black screen until the app appeared — and if JavaScript failed outright, that was all you ever got. There is now a plain description of what ReadKinetic does in its place, with links to the rest of the site, replaced by the reader the moment it is ready. Nothing about how the app works has changed: it is still your browser doing all of it, with nothing uploaded.

You no longer have to click to see what is in a menu, and moving the mouse down into one no longer closes it in your face — there was a small dead gap between the label and the menu that used to swallow the pointer. Clicking "Blog" now takes you to the essays page rather than only opening a list.

All nineteen essays now live at readkinetic.com/blog, grouped by subject rather than buried in a dropdown — guides, the neuroscience of eye movement, the measured research numbers, honest comparisons, accessibility, and reading in scripts most speed readers were never built for. You can subscribe to them by RSS from the same page.

The Legal and 404 pages were missing the paper grain the rest of the site has, because the texture was defined in a stylesheet those two pages do not load. It now lives somewhere every page can reach, and the EPUB and PDF pages picked it up too.

Why most speed readers break on Japanese, Chinese and Thai — and what it takes to fix. How to read research papers and textbooks faster, including the order to read a paper in, which saves more time than any technique. And how long a book actually takes, with real word counts for twelve well-known books at three reading speeds.

Two pages explaining exactly what ReadKinetic does with each format — what it pulls out of an EPUB, what it strips from a PDF, and, just as importantly, what neither can do. If you have ever wondered why a scanned PDF imports empty or why a DRM-protected book will not open, the answers are there.

Two days ago this was reported as fixed. It was not: each page styles its own header, and those styles quietly overrode the shared rule meant to hold the bar clear of a Dynamic Island — so most pages still sat underneath it. Every header is now rebuilt the same way, spanning the full width of the screen with its own clearance for the notch and for the side cutouts in landscape. Checked on all twenty-seven pages rather than assumed.

The small reading demos on the blog still split text on spaces, so the Japanese sample flashed an entire paragraph as one word — demonstrating the exact failure the article next to it was describing. They now segment words the way the app itself has since Tuesday, centre the word for ideographic scripts, use a font that has the glyphs, and report speed in 文字/分.

The About, Contact, Legal and 404 pages were falling back to whatever font your system happened to offer, because the site’s typefaces were only loaded by the pages that pull in the main stylesheet. They now live somewhere every page can reach.

The menus in the site header could both be open at once, and on a narrow screen a long one could run off the edge. Only one opens now, they stay inside the screen whatever its width, they close on Escape, and the Formats menu is no longer hidden on a phone.

Sliding to change speed already paused the words when you were holding to read, but not during hands-free reading — so the text kept flying past while you were still choosing a pace. Now it waits in both, and picks up again at the new speed the moment you let go.

The help screen was an eight-step tour that ended by telling you to start reading — which is odd, because you are already reading. It is now a single reference sheet: every gesture and every keyboard shortcut, grouped by what you are trying to do, so you can find the one thing you forgot and get back to your book.

The pace already eased off before individual difficult words. It now also notices when a whole passage is heavier than the rest of the book — a technical stretch, a dense argument — and carries a slightly slower pace through it, then lifts again. The change is deliberately gradual, so you feel the weight of the passage rather than a gear change.

Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Khmer, Lao and Burmese do not put spaces between words, so a whole paragraph used to arrive as a single flashed "word". ReadKinetic now finds the real word boundaries in those scripts. Japanese also reads the way Japanese should: the word sits centred, the speed is shown in 文字/分 (characters per minute) instead of a misleading word count, the ideographic comma gets its proper pause, and the text renders in a font that actually has the glyphs. Nothing changes for English.

Most EPUBs never mark where the story begins, so they opened on the cover. ReadKinetic now works it out from the book’s own structure and skips past the cover, title page, copyright and contents. It is deliberately cautious: if there is any doubt, it leaves you at the start rather than risk skipping real writing.

Copy an article anywhere, open Import, and tap once to paste it in. It works on every device, including iPhone and iPad, where getting a file into a browser is otherwise awkward.

The highlighted letter in the middle of each word could land inside a character in Hindi, Tamil, Arabic and some emoji, splitting it in half. It now always lands on a whole character, in every script.

On the website, headers now stay pinned as you scroll and no longer hide behind the camera notch or Dynamic Island on newer iPhones.

On a very small screen the menus used to fill the whole display and squeeze the reading word down to a sliver — or off the screen entirely. Now the interface sheds what it does not need as the screen shrinks, so the word always has room. On a watch-sized browser the reader fills roughly two-thirds of the screen instead of a tenth. Nothing changes on a normal phone or desktop.

On some layouts the chapter menu opened behind the reading area, so tapping a chapter started reading instead of jumping to it. It now opens cleanly on top, closes with a tap anywhere outside, and fits any screen.

ReadKinetic now pulls the font a publisher embedded in an EPUB and reads the book in it — the way the book was meant to look. This is the new default; you can still force one font for everything, or pin a specific font to a single book. Your library shows each book in the font it will open in.

Rebuilt from the ground up. Each book leads with how much of it is left — “about 3 sittings”, “6 chapters to go” — because that is the thing you actually want to know when choosing what to pick up. Real titles and authors are read from the file instead of the filename, and every book gets a small colour identity of its own.

Once you are reading hands-free, one tap — or the spacebar — stops it. Getting out of a mode should never cost more than getting in.

A PDF that is really a stack of page images has no text to read. Instead of importing something blank and leaving you puzzled, ReadKinetic now says so and points you at OCR.

While words are moving, the buttons and chrome recede and the light closes gently in around the word; everything returns the instant you stop. It fades out slowly and comes back fast on purpose — a quick fade would catch your eye, which is the one thing a reader like this exists to prevent. On by default, and switchable in Settings.

Reading is not perfectly even — you slow a little as a difficult word approaches. ReadKinetic now does the same, easing the pace down over the couple of words before a rare or long one, then recovering. It works out which words are hard from the book itself, so it needs no dictionary and works in any language.

Sixteen scenes, each with its own light — a lamp pool, a candle that quietly breathes, moonlight, a darkroom safelight that protects your night vision, a drafting-table blueprint. Not colour swatches, but somewhere the page is actually lit.

A dense book and a thriller are not read at the same pace. ReadKinetic now keeps a separate reading speed for each book and restores it when you open it, and the library estimates time-left at that book’s own pace.

Running headers, footers and stray page numbers no longer land in the middle of your sentences, and words split across a line break are rejoined while genuine compounds like “well-being” are left alone. A quiet check now runs on every import and warns you if a file came out badly, instead of handing you a mess without a word.

Unread EPUBs now start at chapter one instead of the cover, title page and copyright — when the file marks where its content begins. The front matter is still there if you scrub back for it.

Upload a .ttf, .otf or .woff and read anything in it. Stored on your device only, like everything else here.

The welcome now walks you through each gesture — hold to read, lock continuous play, scrub, change speed — by having you actually perform it once, so you reach your first book already knowing how it works.

A little confirmation used to appear over the reading area every few seconds, which pulled your eye off the word. Saving still happens constantly and automatically — it just no longer announces itself.

A free, local-first speed reader for your own EPUBs, PDFs and text — one word at a time, entirely in your browser, with nothing uploaded and no account. Shared with the world for the first time on Hacker News.