Read an EPUB in your browser

No. The file is unzipped inside this tab and read from your computer’s memory — there is no upload and no copy on any server. The book’s own images are pulled out of the file itself, and any image or stylesheet it points at on the internet is ignored rather than fetched, so opening a book here does not tell anyone that you did.

It opens DRM-free .epub files, which is what Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg, itch.io, Humble Bundle and most publishers’ own stores give you. Books bought through Kindle are .azw/.kfx and carry Amazon’s DRM, and Kobo library books carry Adobe’s — no web page can open either, ours included.

Because the publisher’s stylesheet is deliberately not loaded. Book CSS routinely hardcodes black text on a white page, which is unreadable the moment you switch to a dark background, so this reader applies its own typography to every book instead. You get consistent margins, spacing and type size, and both reading surfaces always work.

It remembers the chapter you were on, for the last book you opened, in this browser. Nothing about the book itself is stored — not the file, not its text — so opening it on a different device or in a private window starts fresh.

Books up to 100MB, which is past even a heavily illustrated one. The whole file is unpacked in memory to make chapter jumps instant, and beyond that size that stops being a good trade on an average laptop.

Yes, a chapter at a time, with each word highlighted on the page as it is spoken. The free voice is the one built into your operating system — no key, no account. Switch to an AI voice and it runs on your own OpenAI or xAI key, straight from your browser to them, and you get a real MP3 of the chapter to keep.

Two reasons, and neither is a paywall trick. A chapter is what is on screen, so the highlighting has something to follow; and on the AI voice you are paying your own provider by the character, so a whole novel in one click would be a genuinely unpleasant surprise. Reading whole books end to end, remembering where you stopped and syncing that across devices is what the full AllReads app is for.

No. It goes straight from your browser to OpenAI or xAI and nowhere else — it never reaches an AllReads server, and it is not written to your browser’s storage either, so closing the tab discards it. You can confirm that in your browser’s network tab: the only request carrying the key goes to the provider’s own domain.