Reader — bring your own book

You are working through a coursebook in your target language. You hit a word you don't know, so you stop, copy it out, look it up somewhere else — and by the time you come back you have lost the exercise you were in. Twenty times a page, and you do less and less of the book.

Reader takes the file you already have. Add a PDF or a photo of a page, say which language the text is in, and it opens here — with every word tappable, the same way words work in the podcast player.

Watch the whole thing · 4:30

The page stays the page

A coursebook is not a wall of text. It is columns, speech bubbles, photos numbered 1 to 3, and an exercise whose whole question is which picture goes with which word. Pull the text out of that and you have destroyed the exercise.

So the default does not pull anything out. "Pages only" shows the real PDF — same layout, same pictures, same fonts — and lays the tappable words invisibly on top of it. Nothing is converted, which is also why it is ready the moment the file has finished uploading.

• "Pages only" — the default, and what you want for anything with a layout: a coursebook, a magazine, a paper with figures. The PDF exactly as it is, ready at once.
• "Text" — pulls the words out of a PDF that already has real text and gives you the reflowing reader: bigger type, page by page, and a "Make a deck" button that ranks the page's vocabulary for you. Best for novels and articles.
• "Text + scans" — a scan or a photograph has no text in it at all, so each page is read as an image instead. A photo always goes this way; there is nothing else it could be.

A 300MB textbook, without the wait

The file goes up in pieces, straight to storage, and the upload survives a dropped connection instead of starting over. That is what makes a 190MB scanned coursebook a normal thing to open rather than a file you give up on.

Reading it does not wait for the whole book either. Pages are fetched as you reach them, so a 193-page book opens on page one in about a second, and the pages you never turn to are never downloaded.

Tap a word, stay on the line

A tap opens the meaning in place, over the page you are reading: pronunciation, the level the word sits at, examples you can hear, synonyms, the word family, and the full conjugation if it is a verb. Nothing navigates.

That is the whole design. The reason looking words up breaks your reading is that it takes you somewhere else, and by the time you are back you have to find your line again.

• The meaning is given in your own language, and you can switch language inside the dialog for every word after it.
• Add the word to any deck you own, from the lookup itself — one button, not a detour.
• Drag across a phrase and a small bar appears: hear it, translate the whole phrase, or turn it into a note.
• Rest on a word without clicking and a small play button appears under it, so you can hear a word without opening anything at all.

Notes that stay where you left them

Select any text on a page and choose Note. What you write is attached to that phrase, on that page, and the phrase keeps a soft underline afterwards — so next time you come past it, you can see that this is the line that gave you trouble.

The note itself is a proper editor with bold, headings, lists and code, and a preview tab. Notes about the page rather than about a phrase go in without selecting anything, from the panel.

• The Notes panel lists every note in the book, with the page it belongs to.
• Search across all of them — by what you wrote, or by the phrase you highlighted.
• Click a note and the book scrolls to the exact spot on the exact page, and marks it.
• An underlined phrase never blocks the word under it: you can still tap any word inside your own note.

The book's own recordings, on the page they belong to

A coursebook prints a headphone icon beside an exercise and expects you to have the CD, or to photograph the page with the publisher's app. Tell the Reader which book this is, and it reads the book for you: every listening instruction gets a play button, sitting right on the icon that was printed there.

Press it and the track plays in the same bar at the bottom of the screen that holds your podcasts — same scrubber, same skip buttons, same speed control, and it keeps playing while you move around the app. The recordings are streamed from the publisher's own site, the same files their printed codes point at; we host none of it and copy none of it.

• Open a word while a recording is playing and it pauses, then picks up again when you close the dialog — you never miss the next sentence because you were reading.
• The Audio panel lists every recording in the book; search by track or by page number and it takes you there.
• Supported today: Édito A1, A2, B1 and B2, plus the A1 and A2 workbooks. More are rows in a table, not a release.

It remembers, so you can stop mid-page

Every time you open a document it becomes a sitting, and where you stopped is written down as you read. Come back tomorrow and Reader opens on "Continue reading" with the right book and the right page — closing the laptop in the middle of an exercise costs you nothing.

The notes, the highlighted phrases and the words you looked up are kept with the document too. Nothing you do on a page is only true until you close the tab.

The rest of the controls

• Type a page number to jump there; the field follows your scrolling the rest of the time.
• Zoom from 50% to 300%, in steps — the page is re-rendered at the new size rather than scaled up, so small print stays sharp.
• Change which language the text is in at any time, without re-adding the file.
• Your reading list is one queue with the book you are currently in on top, and our own graded library sits in the same place if you have nothing of your own to read.

Your documents are yours

Nobody else can open what you add — not other readers, and not the catalogue. A book kept as pages keeps its file, because that file IS the book you are reading; delete the document and it goes with it.

How to start

1. 1

   Open Reader

   It is in the sidebar under Home. Nothing to switch on.

2. 2

   Add a document

   A PDF up to 300MB or a photo up to 10MB. Say which language the text is in — that is what the meanings and pronunciation are based on.

3. 3

   Leave it on "Pages only"

   Unless you are adding a novel, in which case "Text" gives you the reflowing reader and the deck button.

4. 4

   Read, and tap what you don't know

   Select a phrase to note it. If it is a coursebook, name the book in the toolbar and its recordings appear on the pages.