Embed a book anywhere with Monocle: the browser-based eBook

An eBook reader on your browser? Yes, that’s what we’ve got here in Monocle, an online e-Reader that lets you embed books on your website in an easy-to-read form.

It works well on mobile too – running from a browser on any internet-enabled smartphone

Monocle is open-source and run under the MIT open license. You can embed a ‘book’ on any webpage with two lines of code – one to include the library, one to initialize the reader.

“We’re concerned that the current ebook landscape is dominated by large companies trying to lock publishers, authors and readers into their devices and distribution models”, Monocle’s Jospeh Perason said. “We suspect this might be good for those companies, but no good for everyone else. There’s a need to open up these fields to smaller players, and to give the consumer — the person who loves to read books and to ‘have’ books — better choices.”

Having a browser-based eBook may seem to make a mockery of the whole eBook idea: now it’s all just text on a screen innit? However though the difference between Monocle’s eBook and a standard screen of text online may seem to be small, it is actually significant. Genuinely quite easy to read and the page-turning clicks are useful and smooth. And as their CEO points out, its open-source, embed-anywhere options will be good for readers.

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