A calmer reading view and a portrait book grid for ElevenReader.
ElevenReader is a good audio reader wrapped in a busy interface. Calm Reader strips the chrome away: one centred column of text, a quiet sidebar with the chapters and the player, and a library that looks like a shelf instead of a dashboard. Hover any word for a short definition. Everything else — your login, your library, your audio — stays exactly where ElevenReader put it.
Unofficial. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by ElevenLabs or Cambridge University Press. ElevenReader is a trademark of its owner; Cambridge Dictionary definitions belong to Cambridge University Press.
A reading column that stays out of the way. Text is capped at 720px and centred, with generous line height, a serif-free stack, and no floating toolbars. Light, dark and system themes.
One sidebar for everything. Chapter list, cover, and the native ElevenReader player live in a single collapsible rail, so navigation and playback are in the same place. The rail gets out of the way when you want the page to yourself.
A shelf, not a grid of cards. The library page becomes a portrait book grid with covers at a consistent 2:3 ratio, title and author underneath, and a play button on hover.
Reading progress, visible. Percentage read and time left sit in the footer next to chapter position.
Keyboard and mouse that match reading. Space toggles play/pause. Clicking a word seeks the audio to it. Hovering a word for about 650ms shows a short Cambridge Dictionary definition with a link to the full entry.
Preferences that persist. Theme, font, and text size are stored in your browser's local storage and applied before the page paints, so there is no flash of the old layout.
The extension is loaded from source:
- Open
chrome://extensions - Turn on Developer mode
- Click Load unpacked
- Select this folder
- Open ElevenReader and pick a book
Edge, Brave, Arc and other Chromium browsers use the same steps. Firefox is not supported, because the extension relies on Chromium's content-script behaviour.
Calm Reader is a content script, not a wrapper. It reads the page ElevenReader has already rendered, marks the elements it needs, and applies a stylesheet plus a small amount of DOM reshaping. Audio, authentication, subscriptions and library data all continue to come from ElevenReader itself.
startup.jsruns atdocument_startto set the theme before first paintlibrary.jsrestyles the library into a portrait gridcontent.jsbuilds the reading view, sidebar, and player controlsdictionary.jsanddictionary-background.jshandle hover lookupsfonts.jsloads the bundled Inter Variable font
It depends on ElevenReader's current page structure, so a big front-end change on their side may need a matching update here.
| Permission | Why |
|---|---|
https://elevenreader.io/* |
To display the reading view and library grid where you read |
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/* |
To fetch a definition for the single word you hover |
Only the hovered word is sent to the dictionary. No book text, account data, or credentials leave your browser. There is no analytics, no tracking, and no developer server. See PRIVACY.md.
# edit the files, then
# chrome://extensions → reload the extension → refresh ElevenReaderHandy when debugging on a reader page:
document.documentElement.dataset.calmStartup // startup lifecycle
document.documentElement.dataset.calmSidebar // "open" | "closed"
localStorage.getItem('elevenreader-calm-preferences-v1')There is no build step — the files in the repository root are the extension.
Inter Variable is bundled under the SIL Open Font License; see fonts/Inter-LICENSE.txt. SF Pro Display falls back to the system font on macOS. Cambridge Dictionary definitions remain the property of Cambridge University Press and are shown with attribution and a link to the full entry.
MIT — see LICENSE.