Cursor for reading books

A quiet reading room for dense documents.

Kitab is a local-first PDF reader with the intelligence woven into reading itself. Select a passage and ask what it means, summarize a chapter, or turn a section into flashcards. Every answer points back to the page it came from.

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Indexed on your device. The cloud is an opt-in, never an assumption.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.pdf

II. The Route to Normal Science

In this essay, “normal science” means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice.

Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like.

Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the community’s willingness to defend that assumption, if necessary at considerable cost.

The reading loop

Select anything. Ask in place. Stay on the page.

There is no separate chatbot to switch to. Highlight a passage or draw a box over a figure, and the answer arrives where you are reading, grounded in the words in front of you.

The paradigm, by defining what counts as a legitimate problem, also insulates the community from problems it cannot yet state.

Explanation

A paradigm sets the boundary of acceptable questions. Anything outside it is not wrong so much as invisible, until the paradigm itself shifts.2

Cited from page 24

What it does while you read

Four ways to understand more, without leaving the document.

Chat with your document, with receipts

Ask a question and Kitab answers from the pages you imported, not from the open internet. Each claim carries a citation chip you can click to jump straight to the source page.

Practitioners take the field’s picture for granted 1, solving the puzzles it defines 3.

Explain a passage

Select a dense sentence and get a plain reading of it, in the context of the surrounding argument.

Summarize a chapter

Collapse a long section into its load-bearing ideas before you commit to reading every line.

Turn a section into flashcards

Generate review cards from what you just read, each one tied back to the page it was drawn from.

Sidecars running locally

Your library never leaves your desk.

Local-first is not a setting buried in preferences. It is how Kitab is built. Documents are indexed on your machine, the search engine listens only to itself, and your keys stay in the system keychain. Work on a plane; nothing notices.

On-device embeddings
Every page is indexed locally with an on-device embedding model. Your reading is turned into search without a round trip to anyone else’s server.
Loopback-only vector store
The vector database binds to localhost and nothing else. There is no remote endpoint to leak to, because there is no remote endpoint.
Keys in the OS keychain
If you do opt into a cloud model, the key lives in your operating system keychain, and the choice is always visible and reversible.

Who it is for

For the curious generalist who reads across fields, and wants a companion that travels with the book, not one locked to a single domain.

Papers, manuals, long PDFs, the book you keep meaning to finish. Kitab treats the document as the protagonist and stays at the edges until you call it. The aim is a reader who closes a hard text with more understanding, having barely noticed the software.

Read the hard things, and actually finish them.

Download for Mac Free while in beta. macOS 13 and later.