Reader

The reader is where somebody else’s published work is read. It is not the writing screen and shares nothing with it: no panel, no editor and no way to write into the work. Reading needs no account.

The rail on the left holds the chapters, the position and the bookmarks. The arrow keys move a paragraph at a time and carry over the chapter ends; Page down and Page up move a whole chapter; B adds a bookmark on the paragraph being read. A bookmark carries you back to the paragraph it marks.

The reading position and the bookmarks stay on this device. Nothing is stored anywhere about what anybody reads. The one thing that leaves the device is how far a work you follow has been read, which is what the unread mark on the Following screen is drawn from.

Two reading modes. Scroll keeps the whole chapter in one column. Pages lays the chapter out in pages at the reading measure, turned with the buttons or with a swipe, and the page shown follows the paragraph being read.

The work card carries what a reader can do. Kudos, one per reader and behind an account. Follow work and Follow writer. Share, which copies the address. Save to a reading list, into a list you own or collaborate on. Fork, where the permission allows it. Report.

The verification card reads what the writer chose to disclose. Four levels. None says so and carries nothing. Statistics carries the shares the server found when it read the record: how much of the work was typed, pasted, imported or written by a model, and how many sittings it took. Skeleton and full carry the record itself. The level is the writer’s choice at publish and the verification beside it is the server’s own finding from the record it read, not a claim the writer made.

Comments are not built yet. Kudos are the whole of what a reader leaves on a work, and the comments card says so rather than offering a box that goes nowhere.

The Asterism opens where the writer shares it. A work that shares the graph opens the graph; a work that shares the sheets opens a star’s full sheet as well. Either way it is read as of the chapter you stand in, so nothing ahead of your reading is shown, and nothing on it can be written: every field is read only and the way out is back to the reader.

Suggestions reach the writer where the work takes them. Select a paragraph, press Suggest, and put a fact, a relation or a correction to the writer. It lands in their proposal queue with you named as the source. A guest sees the control locked with its reason.

Try: open a work whose verification card says statistics, and read the four shares. Then open one whose writer disclosed nothing: the card names the level and says the writer disclosed no record, which is a different thing from a work that has no record at all.