Articles
Practical guides to digital reading
Clear, practical writing on EPUB and PDF, e-readers, on-device AI, and learning a language through real books.
What is a local AI e-reader, and why would you want one?
Cloud reading apps send every word you look up to someone else's server. Running the model on the device changes what is possible — and what is knowable about you.
How to read a book in a language you are still learning
Choosing the right book, deciding which words to look up, and why finishing something easy beats abandoning something hard.
Where to find free EPUB books, legally
Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, Open Library and your own library card — and how to tell a good edition from a bad one.
EPUB vs PDF on a phone: which should you actually use?
One reflows to your screen, the other is a photograph of a printed page. What that means in practice — and when PDF is still right.
How a language model fits on a phone
Where the gigabytes go, what quantisation trades away, and what GGUF, Q3_K_S and memory-mapping mean in plain terms.
How to open EPUB files on iPhone and Android
iOS hands the file to Apple Books; Android has no reader at all. What to do with the file, and the four reasons one refuses to open.
Do reading apps track what you read?
Four different things leave your phone, and the smallest of them — the words you look up — gives away the most. How to check any app in a minute.
How many words do you need to read a book in another language?
Around 8,000 word families for comfortable reading. Why the number is that high, and why you can start a long way below it.
How to learn a language by reading books
Choose a book you mostly understand, skip the words that do not matter, and check the ones that do — a method built from extensive-reading research.
How to choose an English book for your CEFR level
What B1, B2 and C1 mean for a book rather than for you, why the coverage figures look worse than they are, and where to start — from 170 measured books.
Best books for B1 English learners
All 29 books on the shelf that measure B1 — including Hemingway and Remarque — with reading hours and how much of each you would follow.
Best books for B2 English learners
Seventy-three measured books, and the level is no longer what limits you. Austen, Carroll, Dickens and Wells all sit here.
Why learning vocabulary in context works
Context does not teach you a word by repeating it — 55% of the hard words in a book appear only once. What it does is tell you which meaning is in play.