smartreader · runs on your machine
Highlight what lost you.
Understand it here.
A reflowing reader with a study panel beside it. Every explanation is kept with the book, so the passage that stopped you carries its answer from then on.
In short
Open a PDF, an EPUB, a Word file or plain text, highlight the sentence that lost you, and have it explained in plain English — by a model running on your own machine. Nothing you read, highlight or write leaves the computer.
01 Read
One column of serif text,
set in your type.
A reflowing reader, not a page viewer: the text is set at your size and width, which is what lets highlights, resizing and the model's context all work on the same string.
- Structure kept Chapters, headings, emphasis, footnotes, tables and pictures survive the import.
- Aa Type size, line height, measure, serif or sans — each applying as you drag.
- Remembered The reading position is kept per book, written on a debounce, never per scroll frame.
02 Explain
Four things worth doing
in the second after letting go.
Select any words. A small bar offers Explain, Simpler, Define, or a note of your own. The answer streams into the study panel beside the text.
- Explain What the passage means, in plain English.
- Define The term as it is used here, not in general — double-click a word and the card fills in.
- Kept Asking about a passage is itself the act of marking it: the answer is saved as it lands.
03 Study this
Let it read the whole book
before it explains a line.
Press once and the model reads the book chapter by chapter and writes a summary of each. From then on every explanation is given the book's summary and the chapter's, so a name from forty pages earlier is resolved rather than guessed at.
- Background Keep reading while it runs; a question of yours cuts the pass short and it resumes after.
- Notes Every highlight, explanation and note, grouped by book, searchable, exportable as Markdown.
Screens
What it looks like.
Light and dark, following the system. The screenshots are the app itself, not renderings.
Try it
The interface, in your browser.
The demo is the real interface with a sample book and canned, word-by-word answers in place of the model. Everything you do in it stays in this tab and is gone when you close it.
Under the hood
On your machine. Only on your machine.
PDF, EPUB, DOCX, Markdown and plain text. Scanned PDFs need OCR first and are refused rather than imported badly.
Qwen3.5 9B, Q4_K_M — the 4B on machines the 9B would not fit. Shared with smartwriter and smartdiary.
16K window, per-model in the shared runtime's preset; explanations use under 2K of it.
Extracted text once per document, the index apart from it, both written through a temp file and a rename.
The full documentation covers formats, storage, every setting and every environment variable: read the smartreader docs. Or read how the shared model runtime works.
How it works
From download to first answer in minutes.
- 01
Install
Download the .dmg or the Windows installer.
- 02
First run
The app fetches the engine and the weights once, into the store every kumulativ app shares — or finds them already there.
- 03
Import
Drop a book on the window. It is read once and never needs to be present again.
- 04
Read
Highlight what lost you. Everything after that is offline.
Download
Take it home.
Free. No account, no telemetry. The model is not in the installer — the app fetches it once, into the store every kumulativ app shares.