Open Book Reader

Install from the Chrome Web Store  ·  Website

Turn any long web article into a two-page open-book view with keyboard page-flipping. Extracts the article with Mozilla Readability, paginates it into left/right pages, and lets you flip with the arrow keys — with a realistic page-turn (soft paper curl or 3D book), paper / light / dark themes, adjustable font, all settings synced.

Open source (MIT). The whole extension lives in this repo — reading is fully local and nothing is sent to the developer, so you can read every line and verify that yourself.

Load unpacked (development)

1. Go to chrome://extensions
2. Enable Developer mode (top right)
3. Load unpacked → select this folder
4. On any article, click the toolbar 📖 icon or press Alt+B

Controls

Action	Keys
Next / prev page	→ ↓ Space PageDown / ← ↑ PageUp
First / last	Home / End
Font size	+ / −
Theme	T
Exit	Esc or click the toolbar icon again
Page edges	click left / right edge to flip

The reader resumes where you left off — reopen an article and you land on the same page — and shows a slim progress bar plus an estimated reading time as you go.

Settings (font, theme, width, spine, line height) live on the options page and sync via chrome.storage.sync. Per-article reading positions are kept locally (chrome.storage.local), not synced.

Architecture

manifest.json            MV3: action + 2 commands + permissions
src/background.js        service worker — injects engine on gesture; runs downloads
src/content/
  settings.js            shared defaults + storage helpers (globalThis.OBR)
  readability.js         bundled Mozilla Readability (Apache-2.0)
  reader.js              text engine: extract → paginate → navigate (Shadow DOM)
  zip.js                 minimal ZIP writer (OBR._buildZip)
  gallery.js             image mode: collect images → masonry + lightbox (Shadow DOM)
src/options/             options page (html + js)
icons/                   16/32/48/128

Two modes: text (Alt+B) and image gallery (Alt+Shift+B). The engine is injected only when invoked — nothing runs against any page otherwise. Styles use Constructable Stylesheets inside a Shadow DOM, so strict-CSP sites can't block or interfere.

Permissions

Installed with a minimal set — nothing scary at install time:

• activeTab + scripting — render the reader/gallery on the page you invoke it on
• storage — remember your settings
• contextMenus — the right-click "Open in Book Reader" menu and per-site rules
• commands (manifest) — the Alt+B / Alt+Shift+B shortcuts

Requested only on first use, never at install (optional permissions):

• downloads — save images you explicitly download from the gallery
• <all_urls> host access — fetch image bytes cross-origin to bundle a ZIP you request

No data collection, no telemetry, nothing sent to the developer. The extension makes network requests only when you explicitly download images (the browser fetches those image URLs to save them). Core reading/extraction is fully local.

Store assets

npm run screenshots loads the unpacked extension into headless Chromium and writes the Chrome Web Store listing images to store-assets/ (gitignored — regenerate any time):

• 01-reader-paper.png … 05-options.png — five 1280×800 feature shots (text reader paper + dark/3-column, gallery masonry, lightbox, options page)
• promo-440x280.png — the 440×280 promo tile

Shots are driven by the demo fixtures in tests/fixtures/demo-*.html, so they need no network.

Website

The public landing page + privacy policy live in site/ and are hosted on GitHub Pages, auto-deployed by .github/workflows/pages.yml on every push to master:

• Site: https://kouxing2000.github.io/open-book-reader/
• Privacy policy: https://kouxing2000.github.io/open-book-reader/privacy.html (use this URL in the store listing)

Static HTML, no build step — just edit site/ and push. (One-time repo setup: Settings → Pages → Build and deployment → Source = "GitHub Actions".)

(The screenshots in site/img/ are copies of store-assets/ — refresh them after npm run screenshots if the UI changes.)

Store listing

All Web Store listing copy + the asset→slot mapping live in store/LISTING.md — the source of truth to paste from when submitting a new version (item ID, description, permission justifications, privacy answers, URLs). Listing fields are dashboard-only; the API (npm run deploy) only uploads/publishes the package.

Before publishing (checklist)

• Set homepage_url in manifest.json to the live site
• Host the privacy policy publicly — https://kouxing2000.github.io/open-book-reader/privacy.html
• Capture 1280×800 screenshots + 440×280 promo tile — npm run screenshots
• Data-disclosure form: no data collected / transmitted; note network requests occur only on user-triggered image downloads. downloads + <all_urls> are optional and requested at first download, so install asks for none of them.
• Confirm single-purpose description matches behavior
• Bump version per release
• Update the "Add to Chrome" link in site/index.html once the store listing is live

Contributing

Contributions welcome — it's a no-build, zero-dependency extension, so the loop is just edit + reload. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the dev setup and the reload gotcha, CHANGELOG.md for the release history, and SECURITY.md to report a vulnerability privately.

Credits

Article extraction by Mozilla Readability (Apache-2.0, see src/content/READABILITY-LICENSE.md).

License

MIT. Bundled Mozilla Readability is Apache-2.0 (src/content/READABILITY-LICENSE.md).