Everything new,
newest first.

Books carry their real cover into the library — the one from the EPUB, the cover.jpg beside a Calibre book, or the first page of a PDF. Each is kept as a small picture of about three kilobytes, so a five-hundred-book library spends roughly two megabytes on cover art and stays recognisable at a glance. Books with no cover of their own still get the typeset card built from their title, and on the E-Ink theme every cover desaturates to sit inside the page rather than being the one colourful thing on it. Books already in your library keep their typeset card; only the original file has a cover in it, and that is not something the app keeps, so they need re-importing to pick one up.

ReadKinetic is meant to keep working with the network off, and it did not. The stored copy of the app was being saved correctly and then never found again when it was needed, because of a mismatch in how the browser looks up saved files, so going offline left you with a page and nothing on it. Both the reader and readkinetic.com/can-i-read-this now genuinely open and run with no connection — the checker even identifies files offline, which is the one thing it always claimed and could not do for anyone who had not opened the app first. Two more on the checker: a library loan from OverDrive or Adobe Digital Editions is a valid EPUB whose text happens to be encrypted and was being reported as fine, and is now identified as DRM — while books that merely scramble an embedded typeface to satisfy a font licence, as many publishers do, still open normally. Safari could not read PDFs there and was told they would not open, which was wrong. Space used in Settings now also separates your books from the copy of the app kept for offline use, because clearing your library moved a number that was mostly never your library.

Import now takes a folder as well as a file. Point it at your Calibre library and it reads the catalogue — titles, authors, series — shows you everything it found, and lets you pick what to bring in. Where a book exists as both an EPUB and a PDF it takes the EPUB, because that reads far better. It tells you how much space the selection needs before it starts, names anything it could not open rather than quietly dropping it, and stops cleanly if you change your mind halfway. The folder is read once, on your device, and nothing is uploaded.

readkinetic.com/can-i-read-this takes any file and tells you what it actually is — not what its name claims — whether it carries DRM, and precisely what to do if it will not open. It reads the first four kilobytes, so the answer arrives instantly whether the file is two kilobytes or two gigabytes, and a Kindle book with DRM is identified with certainty from those bytes alone. Nothing is uploaded; the check happens in your own tab, and works with the wifi off.

On some phones two words in a row could overlap — "their" followed by "enthusiasm," arriving as "entheir asm,". It happened whenever consecutive words shared the same centre letter, which left the browser with no change in shape to redraw around. Fixed, along with three smaller things: a very long final word could leave you stuck part-way through it at the end of a book, the faint neighbouring words now follow the parts of a split word instead of skipping ahead, and the paste box in Import can be typed into rather than only pasted into. Reported by Otto Hammar and Martyn Parker.

The second half of readkinetic.com/speed-test climbs steadily in speed, and every question is tied to a point in that climb — so it can now tell you the fastest pace you were still following the passage at, question by question. That is a more useful number than a top speed, because it is the one you can actually read at. Suggested by Yash Gupta.

A word wider than your screen used to run off the edge and lose its ending — worst on a phone, at the largest text size, and in the languages that build long words: Turkish, German, Finnish. A word that only just misses now shrinks a fraction to fit. A word far too long arrives in pieces, hyphenated, one after another, the way print breaks a word across a line. That is also closer to what your eyes do on paper, where a word of forty letters takes more than one look rather than one.

Some letters were losing a sliver of themselves — the leading serif of an italic R, the tail of an f, the left side of a B. It was worst in italics but happened in upright type too. A soft edge intended for words too long to fit was being applied to each part of the word rather than to the reading area, and it quietly cut off any letter whose shape reaches past its own width, which most italics do. The soft edge now sits where it belongs, so long words still fade out gracefully at the edges and every letter is drawn whole.

A book where one character speaks only in italics became impossible to follow, because the italics were being thrown away with the rest of the markup — and there is no other way to tell who is talking. Emphasis is now carried through: italic, bold, underline and strikethrough all show as the book set them, in EPUB, Kindle, Word, FictionBook, web pages, Markdown and LaTeX. Strikethrough matters as much as italics; a struck-out word means the opposite of what it says. There is a switch in Settings under Engine & Visuals if you would rather read without it. Books already in your library need re-importing to pick it up. Reported by Martyn Parker.

Settings now gives you a twelve-character code for wherever you are in a book. Type it on your phone, laptop or tablet and that device opens the same book at the same word. The code is not a link to anything — it is the position itself, so no account, no sign-in, no server, and no camera required. Both devices need the same file, which is the only way a position can mean the same thing on both.

Plenty of books never say where their chapters are, or say it wrongly. Chapters are now read from the words themselves when a file marks nothing — CHAPTER I, BOOK II, or a bare numeral alone on a line, in six languages — and a chapter list that is obviously broken is topped up rather than trusted. Books from Project Gutenberg also open past the licence page instead of on it.

Only EPUBs, PDFs, FictionBooks and slide decks had a chapter list; everything else arrived as one undivided block, which makes the progress bar meaningless in exactly the long documents where it matters most. Kindle books, Word documents, OpenDocument files and saved web pages all mark their own headings, and nothing was reading them. Now they do, so you get a real chapter list and a sense of how much of this one is left.

readkinetic.com/speed-test measures you twice — once reading a page normally, once with the words brought to you — and reports the difference, which is roughly the share of your reading time spent moving your eyes rather than reading. Every speed is weighted by comprehension questions, and a run that was skimmed rather than read gets no score at all rather than a flattering one. Takes about two minutes and needs no account.

The welcome text said you could “upload” a file, and the empty library said “no books uploaded yet” — in an app whose entire point is that nothing is uploaded anywhere. It read as a contradiction because it was one. The wording now says what actually happens: the file is opened here, in your browser, and stays on your device.

readkinetic.com/formats now lists every file type that opens, what ReadKinetic does with each, and — just as usefully — the ones it will not open, with the reason and the shortest way to read them anyway. There is also a new page on reading without uploading anything, for the people who arrive at this looking for privacy rather than speed.

Twenty-odd new file types open now: DRM-free Kindle books (MOBI, AZW3, PRC), FictionBook (FB2 and FBZ, with its chapters and author intact), OpenDocument (ODT and ODP), PowerPoint (PPTX and friends, one chapter per slide), AbiWord, zipped HTML and text, LaTeX, reStructuredText and Org-mode. All of it parsed on your own device, as ever — nothing is uploaded. Where a file genuinely cannot be read, it now says which format it is, why, and the shortest way to read it anyway, instead of "unsupported file format".

Moving through the text sideways does not feel right to everyone — text scrolls up and down everywhere else. There is now a switch in Settings that trades the two axes over: swipe left and right to set the pace, up and down to move through the book. The control hints and the help sheet change with it, so nothing is left describing the opposite of what your reader does. Suggested by Ofer.

Japanese books print the reading of a kanji in small kana above it, and Chinese ones sometimes print pinyin the same way. Those readings sit above the characters on a page, but they were being spliced into the sentence — 吾輩 arrived as 吾輩わがはい, which is not a word anyone can read. They are now left out, as they are on the page.

Each page was quietly claiming a slightly different web address than the one everything on the site linked to — one with a trailing slash, one without. Search engines treated the two as separate pages, crawled the one nobody was told to index, and left the other uncrawled for a month. There is now a single form, used by the links, the sitemap and the page itself alike. Nothing you can see changed; the address bar may drop a slash.

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.