Seeing the Words You're Reading — How Click Reader Started

Moscow, 1922. The Hotel Metropol.

Count Alexander Rostov has been placed under house arrest by the new government. He's moved into a converted storage room on the hotel's top floor. His cabinet is nickel and glass, filled with French soap, English bath salts, and small bottles in the back row labeled l'eau de vie.

This is the opening of A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.

I kept trying to picture the room. The cabinet. The window with snow falling outside.

I couldn't.

The time was too far. The place was too far. What did 1920s Moscow look like? Was the nickel cabinet cold blue-grey or warm silver under the lamplight? What shade of grey was the Count's beard?

I searched for an illustrated edition. There was almost nothing.

I asked Doubao, ChatGPT, Midjourney to illustrate the book. They produced generic sci-fi wallpapers — interchangeable across any Russian novel, none of them this novel.

General-purpose AI doesn't care what angle the light hits the nickel cabinet. It cares about producing a pretty image.

So I built Click Reader.

Upload an epub. It analyzes the text, extracts key scenes, generates illustrations, and renders a fully illustrated edition of the book.

The first book was A Gentleman in Moscow — for myself.

"Yaroslav's cabinets, however, did not fit this description, because they were made entirely of nickel and glass, a design that not only failed to hide what was inside but seemed deliberately built to let those things be seen."

— A Gentleman in Moscow, Chapter 1

I can finally see this scene now.

Open uploads are still in progress. For now I'm filling what I call the Origin Shelf — the books I needed to see myself.

I won't be making many books. I'd rather do one a month and have it be worthy of the original.

Every book deserves a visual identity built for it — not a generic filter applied on top.

"See the words you're reading."

— Founder, Click Reader