The library · Since 1971 · Free
Project Gutenberg, prepared
Project Gutenberg is one of the best things on the internet: seventy-some thousand books whose copyrights have expired, digitized by volunteers across five decades and given away ever since — no account, no catch. Chromatics is built on it, and gladly says so. Every text in the app comes from Gutenberg’s shelves. What we add is everything between the file and a good evening of reading.
The library · The honest part
What the raw files are like
Download a Gutenberg novel and you get the words — all of them, faithfully — as plain text or a serviceable epub. What you do not get: typography chosen for long reading, any sense of where a scene begins, who is speaking in a page of bare quotation marks, or audio that knows what page you are on. The volunteers’ job was preservation, and they did it magnificently. Presentation was always going to be someone else’s job.
| Reading experience | Raw Gutenberg file | A generic reading app | Chromatics |
|---|---|---|---|
| The text itself | Complete | Complete | Complete, from the same source |
| Typography & themes | Monospace wall | Decent defaults | Set for long reading; three themes, OpenDyslexic available |
| Who is speaking | Quotation marks | Quotation marks | Every speaker in their own color, kept for the whole book |
| Where and when you are | You infer it | You infer it | A scene banner: place, narrator, time, always in view |
| Audio | Separate download, separate life | Rarely, loosely linked | LibriVox recordings matched page by page |
| Your place | A scroll position | On that device | Kept across devices |
The library · Ready now
Ready the moment you open them.
More than sixty classics, fully prepared — colors, scenes, and audio where a good recording exists. Featured titles are free in full; Plus members can have any public-domain book prepared on demand.
The library · Credit where due
And please, also use Project Gutenberg
Nothing here is a substitute for the library itself. gutenberg.org remains the place where these books live free in every format, and the reason an app like this can exist at all. The same goes for LibriVox, whose volunteer readers recorded the audio we sync. If you want to see what the preparation adds, start with Wuthering Heights or the Russian novels collection.
The books were always free. Now they are also a pleasure to read on a phone.
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