About Sketched Books

Sketched Books is a free place to read classic books, or your own EPUBs, with a cartoon sketch of the scene you're on drawn beside the text as you read.

How the sketches are made

Every passage of about 350 words has a short description of its scene, written ahead of time. When you reach a passage, a small AI model draws that scene from the description, right in your browser. It uses your graphics card through WebGPU when your browser has it, and your processor otherwise, which is slower. Nothing you read is sent anywhere.

The model is a 212-million-parameter diffusion transformer, fine-tuned by us to draw in black ink on white. It downloads once (about 167 MB with its helpers) and stays in your browser's cache. Each sketch is drawn fresh, so it can get details wrong: a missing hat, an extra hand, the wrong number of people. That's part of the fun.

Your own books

Open any EPUB without DRM and it's read the same way. Your browser keeps the book; nothing is uploaded. Since no one has described its scenes ahead of time, a second small model (Qwen3, 0.6 billion parameters, which we trained to write scene descriptions) reads each passage first and writes one, then the sketch is drawn from it. These models are a bigger, one-time download (about 510 MB), and each sketch takes a little longer.

The books

The library's books are all in the public domain and come from Project Gutenberg, whose volunteers made the texts. We split them into chapters and passages but didn't change the words.

Everything the site is built with is listed in its credits.