Windows 10 and 11
Read between the loading bars.
A book that floats over your game, editor or render, and turns its pages without ever taking focus.
Free. TXT, EPUB and PDF. No installer, no account, runs offline.
Turn the page. Keep the keyboard.
Ctrl+Alt+PageDown turns the page from anywhere, even mid-game. Clicking or scrolling the page itself does not steal focus either, so the window you were working in never notices.
Make it as small as you like.
Drag an edge and the text reflows to fit, from a strip in the corner to half the screen. The sentence you were on stays at the top, and every book remembers where you left it.
PDFs, as printed
Every page exactly as designed, colours, fonts and pictures included, fitted to the width of the window or shown whole. Scroll through them, or turn them from anywhere with the page hotkeys. The Night theme shows them light on dark.
Or reflowed to fit
For a window too small for the pages, Sidebook can read them with the OCR built into Windows and set the words as plain text that fits. Page numbers go, split words rejoin, and pictures come along.
Paper, Sepia, Night, or just the words.
Pick a page colour and a typeface, then fade the background from solid to invisible. Clear shows only the text, outlined, for reading straight over a game.
Everything else worth knowing.
Three steps, no installer.
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Download the zip
Inside is one 174 KB executable and a readme. That is the whole program.
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Unzip it anywhere
Your desktop, a tools folder, a USB stick. It does not care where it lives.
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Run Sidebook.exe
Windows may warn about an unknown publisher. Click More info, then Run anyway, and drop a book on the window that appears.
Questions people ask.
Windows says it protected my PC. Is this safe?
That is SmartScreen reacting to an unsigned free tool it has not seen before, not a virus warning. Click More info, then Run anyway. Sidebook runs completely offline: no accounts, no tracking, no network access at all.
Does it work over games?
Over windowed and borderless-fullscreen games, yes, and the page hotkeys work either way. Exclusive-fullscreen games bypass the Windows compositor and cover everything, so switch the game to borderless to read over it.
Which books can it open?
Plain text, EPUB and PDF. Books with DRM, which covers most store-bought ebooks, are locked to their own reader apps, so Sidebook cannot open them. DRM-free libraries such as Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks work perfectly.
How good is the PDF reflow?
PDFs open as their printed pages, so nothing is lost. The reflowed text is an option for small windows: it keeps the words, the chapters and the pictures, but not the book's colours, fonts or bold type, and two-column layouts, footnotes, tables and equations come out in a plainer order. Each PDF is read once, in the background, starting from your page.
Does it remember where I was?
Yes, for every book, down to the line. Your place survives resizing the window, changing the font and restarting your PC.
How do I uninstall it?
Choose Exit from the right-click menu and delete the exe. Your reading positions and PDF text are kept in the Sidebook folders under %APPDATA% and %LOCALAPPDATA% if you want those gone too. Nothing else is installed.
Free, and lighter than most book covers.
One 174 KB executable in a zip. No installer, no account, no network access. Delete the file to uninstall.
Works on Windows 10 and 11.