Project Glosa is a working name. Public naming & trademark clearance are in progress.
Glosa
An immersion-preserving reading instrument

The book remains the center.

Glosa restores context, patience, provenance, agency, and memory to digital reading — then knows when to disappear. Read a public-domain classic, or bring your own text. Ask for context in the margin, listen without losing your place, study through active recall, or leave every layer silent.

The Threshold · original before interpretationSavor · Level 2
Herman Melville · Moby-Dick

Loomings

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, I thought I would sail about a little. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.

AI · Context · sourced
spleen
An older sense: melancholy, ill temper, or brooding discontent.
Period dictionary · source span available · Withdraw ×

Original first

The source remains sovereign — untouched and recoverable.

Reader-held dial

Silent through Synthesis. Assistance never turns itself up.

Provenance by default

Every claim shows its source and its uncertainty.

A real ending

A finite work, with no feed waiting behind the book.

The architecture

Context should deepen the work,
not replace it.

Most AI readers put a chat window between you and the page. Glosa keeps the original in view and brings help into the margin only when you ask. Three planes, never silently merged.

Truth plane

Source

The author's authoritative text — exact edition, stable location, original record.

Untouched & recoverable
Authorship plane

Reader

Your notes, questions, highlights, recollections, purpose, and interpretation.

Private by default
Assistance plane

AI

Generated context, inquiry, analysis, synthesis — typed, sourced, and withdrawable.

Never silently merged
Assistance

The dial stays in your hand.

Choose the maximum assistance permitted. Glosa still has to earn every appearance — permission to help is not permission to interrupt.

0
Silent
No generation
1
Access
Dictionary · voice · translation
2
Context
People · dates · allusions
3
Inquiry
Questions · recall
4
Analysis
Claims · evidence
5
Synthesis
Cross-source

The dial never moves itself — and a permitted feature may still choose to withdraw. Silence is a complete product state.

Modes

Different purposes.
No fixed “learning style.”

Glosa configures the session, not the person. Preferences shape presentation; only evidence-supported practices shape the Study tools.

Story & immersion

Savor

Protect the trance. Context stays spoiler-aware; learning prompts stay off unless invited.

Orientation

Inspectional

Adler's pre-read — skim, map, and decide what a work asks of you, fast.

Depth

Study

Analytical reading with recall, confidence, self-explanation, and citation.

Access

Listen

Audio when you need it — self-paced, never at the cost of your place.

Comparison

Research

Syntopical reading — many works around a question you define.

Silence

Reverent

Reader-controlled quiet. Some passages are meant to be left alone.

Your Texts

Your library should not depend on ours.

Bring your own DRM-free book or document. Glosa preserves the source, builds stable reading locations, discloses processing, and keeps conversion uncertainty visible. Your file, your device.

EPUB

DRM-free 2/3 — semantic structure, footnotes, stable locators.

PDF

Page-faithful view, text layer, reading-order quality, source coordinates.

OCR

Explicit local/cloud path, image anchors, confidence, correction layer.

DOCX

Headings, lists, tables, notes, images — sanitized, source-linked.

TXT / MD

Encoding-safe, structured, stable block locations, raw source kept.

Web / HTML

Reader-requested capture — sanitized, timestamped, linked to the live original.

Images

Camera or import, crop/rotate, opt-in OCR, side-by-side with the original.

Legacy

RTF, ODT, DOC, Pages, FB2 and more — isolated rescue conversion, later.

Science & claims

We publish what the evidence
can — and cannot — support.

Glosa doesn't say “brain-based” and hope you stop asking. Every cognitive claim carries a state, a source, a limitation, and a revision date.

Supported

Retrieval & spaced return

Recalling for yourself beats re-reading for long-term memory — with task and interval limits. No universal guarantee.

Context-dependent

Paper vs. screen

A small paper advantage appears in some settings, especially expository reading and self-calibration.

Context-dependent

Audio, text & dual mode

Modality effects depend on material, task, reader, navigation, and measurement. Listening is fine for comprehension; self-paced reading tends to keep more.

Exploratory

Atmosphere & ASMR

Optional and silence-first. No comprehension, nervous-system, or focus-frequency claim.

Not claimed

Fixed learning styles

Preferences configure the interface; Glosa does not diagnose a visual/auditory/kinesthetic “type.” The idea failed the science.

Not claimed

Dramatic speed reading

Inspectional Mode accelerates selection and orientation — not impossible eye-speed promises.

Not claimed

AI knows the meaning

AI offers attributed interpretations and alternatives. The reader keeps authorship.

Not claimed

Automatic sacredness detection

Reverent Mode stays reader-controlled. Glosa does not infer spiritual states.

Reader Data Covenant

Your reading is not training data.

Glosa does not use your books, documents, notes, highlights, questions, voice, or reading history to train shared models — unless you choose a specific contribution, review exactly what will be sent, and consent for that exact purpose.

This session · nothing hidden
Book position: on this device
Reader Compass: on this device
AI request: none
Transmitted: nothing
Shared-model training: no

Diagnostics without content …… Off
Evaluation example …………… Off
Research study ………………… Off
Experience Corpus …………… Off
Model training ………………… Off

Every switch is yours, and off by default.

Opt-in, home-kept, never sold.

If you ever choose to contribute — to improve our own engine, never a third party — you see the exact payload first, and you consent for that one purpose. No ads. No behavioral data sale. No training consent hidden inside general terms.

How it grows

A quiet reader above a deeper substrate.

Glosa scales by deepening the same grammar. The public reader never has to become a research cockpit.

01
Public

Glosa Classics

Approved public-domain editions, a serene Page, margin context, basic listening, a local guest Vault.

02
Personal

Bring your own text

EPUB, PDF, documents, web, scans, OCR, organization, export, optional encrypted sync.

03
Learning

Glosa Study

Inspectional & analytical reading, recall, confidence, self-explanation, spacing, citations.

04
Evidence

Glosa Research

Syntopical comparison, terminology, claims, evidence, timelines, contradictions, dossiers.

05
Substrate

Chronoaesthesis

Corpus lineage, authority tiers, an interdisciplinary concept graph, experience testimony, research agents.

06
Co-presence

Presence

Voice, oral reflection, shared attention, and accessibility — without replacing the page or impersonating lived experience.

Testable in public

The instrument answers to the reader.

The Reader Bill of Rights and our Published Refusals make the philosophy something you can hold us to.

You have the right…

  • to silence and a finite ending;
  • to meet the original before interpretation;
  • to know why anything appears;
  • to distinguish Source, Reader, and AI;
  • to see evidence and uncertainty;
  • to control pace, type, sound, and assistance;
  • to export and delete your data;
  • to leave without being chased by notifications.

Glosa will not…

  • spoil ahead of your position;
  • rewrite the author as original text;
  • decide what a passage means or how it should feel;
  • fabricate a source or a certainty;
  • profile you covertly or diagnose a learning style;
  • promise impossible speed or memory gains;
  • sell reading behavior;
  • hide training consent inside general terms;
  • turn completion into another feed.
Prime · whisper · withdraw

The reader is where the work comes alive.

A book gives us language and structure. The reader supplies pace, inner voice, image, memory, resistance, judgment, and meaning. Glosa exists to protect that meeting.