Book Eating Dog

Turn any web page, PDF or e-book into a retro pixel game: a dog eats the text as you read it.

Reading on a screen is easy to start and hard to finish. Book Eating Dog makes finishing the fun part. Press the toolbar button on any article and the page turns into a little pixel game. A dog walks the first line from left to right, eating one word at a time and leaving a trail behind it. Ordinary words it eats quietly. Interesting ones become fruit — eat them for bonus points. Dangerous ones become bombs — press space to jump. When the dog reaches the end of a line it drops to the next one, and when it finishes the page it turns to the next. You read along with it, at a pace you control, and you get to the end. WHAT IT EATS • Any web page. The article itself is pulled out first, so navigation, sidebars, comments and cookie banners are left behind. • A PDF you already have open in a tab, including ones written in Chinese, Japanese or Korean. • A document from your own computer — a plain text file, a Markdown note, a saved web page, an e-book or a Word file. • Only part of a page: highlight a few paragraphs, right-click, and the dog eats just those. WHILE YOU READ • Eleven speeds, from half pace up to eight times normal. • Read aloud: the dog speaks each line, timed so the speech lasts exactly as long as it takes to walk across it. • Light and dark themes, adjustable text size and line spacing. • Automatic chapter detection, a page scrubber, and precise resume — close the tab and come back later to the exact word you left off on. • A shelf of everything you have read, showing how far you got in each. • Reading time, words eaten and a high score, if you like that sort of thing. LANGUAGES The interface is translated into ten languages and follows whichever one your browser is set to. Alongside English there is Chinese in both simplified and traditional characters, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Russian. Chinese text is divided into real words rather than single characters, so 北京大学 stays one word and the keywords the dog picks out are words people actually use. PRIVACY, PLAINLY There is no server. Nothing you read is uploaded, logged or sent anywhere — there is no "anywhere" to send it to. Everything is stored in your browser, on your own computer, and the extension keeps working with the network switched off. It asks for no standing access to your browsing. The only way it can read a page is if you click its button while you are on that page, which is how Chrome's activeTab permission works. A PDF that has to be downloaded from the site hosting it asks for that one site's permission, once, at the moment you try. Built on the same reading engine as the Book Eating Dog app for iOS and Android.