When a book club meets in a room, everyone can see where everyone else is. Someone looks up, someone turns a page, someone is still on the paragraph you finished a minute ago. Online, that all disappears. The Word Walker is our attempt to bring it back.
Why words, not pages
A page can hold three hundred words. If two readers are on the same page, they may still be a full minute apart. Marking presence at the word makes the difference visible, and it makes live sessions feel like reading beside someone rather than near them.
Reading together should feel like sitting in the same room, not like refreshing the same URL.
How it works
Every reader in a live session has a small marker that walks along the text as they read. Your own position syncs to the word, and you can choose to follow another reader when you want to stay with them.
What you can do with it
- See who is reading right now, and exactly where.
- Follow a reader to move through the book at their pace.
- Leave a comment anchored to the exact word you are on.
Under the hood a position is a chapter plus a word offset, written as a small value:
{ "chapter": 3, "word": 412 }What it feels like in a club
To try it with your own club:
- Upload an EPUB to your library.
- Start a live session and invite your club.
- Read, and watch the markers move.
Use inline details like word offset sparingly; the point is that you never have to think about them.