You searched for the Booktrovert web reader. You want to read a book right in your browser, no downloads, no fuss, the whole thing glowing at you on demand. We understand the impulse. We also want to gently inform you that you have arrived at the wrong Booktrovert, and that ours has a web reader too. It is right here. It is running now. It has always been running.
Here is how it works.
The other Booktrovert promises instant delivery to Kindle, Kobo, and web. Ours delivers instantly too, because there is nothing to load. You open the reader and a single page appears. It is already there. It was there before you arrived. Speed is easy when you refuse to fetch anything.
Their reader lets you scroll, swipe, and flip through an entire book. Ours displays one page and considers the matter closed. There is no next button. There is no previous button. Doug, our founder, removed both in 2001 after deciding that a reader who can leave a page was never really committed to it. The page currently on display is page 114 of a novel none of us has finished. It is a good page. We have grown fond of it.
People write in asking where the download button is. There is no download button. There was a download button briefly in 2004. It downloaded a file called book.txt that contained the words "please buy books" and nothing else. Randy pressed it forty times in one night. We do not know why. We removed the button and we do not miss it.
The modern reader supports EPUB, Kindle, and browser formats. Ours supports one format, and it is the physical book currently sitting on your actual shelf. To use our web reader, hold your laptop up to the shelf, locate the book, remove it with your hands, and open it. The web reader will not assist with this step. The web reader is, at this point, mostly moral support.
If you sit with the page long enough, the Ghost of Mark Twain reads it aloud to you in a low, unimpressed voice, pausing occasionally to note that the author uses the word "suddenly" too much. He does not take requests. He does not do audiobooks. He does a page, once, and then he is gone until you have earned the next one, which by our design you never will.
We know this is not what you came for. You came for the reader that works, the one with the free ebooks and the browser tab that actually holds a book. That one lives at booktrovert.com, and it is genuinely nice, and you should go read something over there. If you get the two of us confused, and everyone does, we once laid the differences out in a table, and we have also explained, at length, what happens when you ask us to send a book to your Kindle.
But if you want to stay and read our one page for a while, pull up a chair. It turns out reading was never about turning the page. It was about being handed one and told, quietly, that this is enough for now.
Patiently,
Booktrovert #212