A book, continued.

Your place in the book travels with you, down to the paragraph you left off on. Other apps drop you at the top of a chapter; this one remembers the line your eye was actually on.

What syncs: your position, your bookmarks, your notes, your library. What doesn’t: the way each device is set up to read.

Every screen has a setup that suits it — scroll, paged, or a two-page spread, whatever fits the moment. ContinuousReader remembers each one separately and keeps only the reading in sync.

Start the chapter in the evening with your eyes on the page. Get in the car the next morning and switch to Read Aloud. The voice picks up from the paragraph you’d reached — the one at the top of your screen, not the start of the chapter.

Listen for half an hour on the drive. Sit down at your Mac, and the book is already scrolled to the paragraph the voice just finished. You pick up reading where the listening stopped.

A soft rounded highlight glides word by word along with the voice. Speed, pitch, and voice are all adjustable, and you can change them mid-sentence — playback resumes from the exact word, never jumping back to the top of the paragraph.

Most reading apps get typography wrong in one of two ways. Some pretend the screen is a book, with skeuomorphic page-curls and fake paper grain. Others dump the text on the screen and walk away — browser defaults, ragged columns, no hyphenation.

ContinuousReader sweats the details.

Five core palettes — Neutral, Ochre, Celestial, Lime, Rose — each with seven tonal variations: from a pure-white extreme on the left, through five mid tones, to a pure-black extreme on the right. Plus two featured themes for the old-school crowd: Typewriter in ivory and dark brown (light and dark variants), dressed in quiet steampunk — a brass dashboard speedometer with a rolling needle, swapped for a vintage radio-dial carriage with a lit red pointer on narrower screens; copper keycaps; mechanical drum counters — and Terminal in white monospace on deep blue (if you recognize the palette — you already know why it’s there). Three custom slots where the colors are yours. Forty-one variants in total.

The two extremes on every colored palette — pure white with saturated palette-color text on the left, pure black with the same on the right — cover the harsh cases: full sun on a beach or in bed with the lights off, in whichever color feels right.

Three picker modes. Fixed — one theme, always. Day & Night — pair a light theme with a dark one and the app switches when your system does. Manual override — force any theme regardless of schedule, for a session that doesn’t fit the rhythm. On any dark theme, a smooth brightness slider tunes the text down from 100% to 30% — for nights when even the dark themes feel too bright.

Highlight a word. Its translation slides into a panel along the bottom of the screen, well clear of the text. No popup to wave off, nothing to close. Hit another word you don’t know and the panel just updates — you never leave the page.

Translate and Bookmark sit right at the top of the selection menu, within reach, instead of below a stack of commands you never touch. Swap their order in settings if you use one more than the other.

Plenty of target languages, all handled by Apple’s on-device Translation framework. Nothing leaves your device.

Every word you look up can be remembered, too. ContinuousReader keeps track of the languages you move between, the words you’ve met before, and the books that sent you to the dictionary most — handy if you’re learning a language, doing research, or just reading across a few of them. Leave tracking off and nothing is written down. Turn it on and you can export the whole history as an HTML report.

Your whole library in three views across your devices: a detailed list for scanning, a grid of covers for browsing, or a sortable table for the librarian in you. Group by author, series, genre, or date; tag books with colored dots; filter by genre; pin the ones you love. Latest and Pinned each get a tab of their own.

EPUB, FB2, MOBI, HTML, TXT, RTF, DOC/DOCX (Mac), and their ZIP variants. Click a button, drop in a file, or drag a URL straight from your browser — the book downloads and the import dialog opens with its title, author, and cover already filled in. Or browse OPDS catalogs: Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg, Feedbooks, or your own server. Following a series? Set a watcher on its feed and new entries get flagged for you.

Track your reading time book by book, watch the streaks and patterns build up, and export it all as an HTML report.

Bookmarks come in seven colors, with notes and highlighted text. Each book gets its own rich-text notes. Everything is searchable, and everything can be exported.

Every book is stored on disk as plain HTML, in folders named so you can actually read them. No proprietary container, no DRM, nothing locked to a cloud you can’t walk away from. Copy or zip the whole library folder whenever you like. It all lives in your own iCloud — or, if you’d rather skip sync, point the app at any local folder and move it whenever you want.

ContinuousReader is written in Swift and SwiftUI, the languages Apple builds its own apps in. You feel it in the small things: it opens the instant you click, scrolling stays smooth however hard you flick it, and shortcuts and swipes behave the way the rest of the system does. The whole app ships as a lean native binary, not a bundled-up copy of a web browser.

On Mac, an island design borrowed from System Settings — rounded floating panels on a recessed background — with keyboard shortcuts, a Book Card that floats above the app, and drag-and-drop more or less everywhere. On iPad, real swipe actions and Split View. On iPhone, gestures built for one hand and sheets that rise from the bottom like the rest of iOS, not like a web form.

The heavy lifting is the system’s, not ours. iCloud stores and syncs your books in your own account. Apple Translation does the in-text translation, on-device and private. The system voice engine drives Read Aloud, using the voices your Mac and iPhone already speak. We didn’t reinvent any of it — we just wired it together properly.