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.

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.

Three ways to read the same free text.
What	Raw Gutenberg file	A generic reading app	Chromatics
The text itself	Complete	Complete	Complete, from the same source
Typography and 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

Ready the moment you open them.

Over a hundred books are ready to read, and many more featured classics are completely free to read. Pro opens the rest of the catalog and the ability to create a Chromatics edition of any of over 50,000 other public-domain classics automatically, usually within the hour.

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.

The books were always free. Now they are also a pleasure to read on a phone.

Free on iPhone and iPad. Point your phone’s camera here. On Android?

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