Course packs and textbooks your students can actually read
Upload a PDF and hand your students a real book — one that opens in any browser, works with no internet at all, reads itself aloud, and treats Arabic as a first-class language rather than an afterthought.
Why institutions pick Inkwell Shift
Arabic and RTL done properly
A right-to-left book turns right-to-left, with the cover and page order a reader expects. The interface is available in Arabic, and the book's own direction is independent of it — so an Arabic textbook reads correctly even for a student browsing in English.
Works with no internet
Export a book as a desktop application for Windows or Linux, or as a self-contained folder that opens in any browser from a USB stick or shared drive. Useful where the connection is unreliable or the room has none at all. (macOS builds are not available yet.)
Students annotate privately
Readers place sticky notes anywhere on a page, bookmark what matters, and pick up where they left off. Notes belong to the individual reader and are never visible to classmates.
It reads itself aloud
Built-in narration in English, Arabic and Chinese, with the sentence being read highlighted on the page. Helpful for accessibility, for language learners, and for students who take material in better by ear.
From PDF to distributed book
Upload the PDF
Course packs, textbooks, scanned handouts, research collections — whatever you already have.
We convert it
Pages are rendered for the screen, the text is extracted so students can search inside the book, and links and contents are preserved.
Distribute it
Share a link, embed it in your LMS or portal, or hand out an offline copy. The same book, three ways.
Three ways to get it to students
A link
Publish the book and share the URL. Students open it in any modern browser — no install, no account needed just to read.
Embedded in your own site
Drop it into your LMS, intranet or department page with one iframe. You can restrict which domains are allowed to embed it, so the book only works where you put it.
An offline copy
A desktop app for Windows or Linux, or a plain folder that opens in a browser. Nothing phones home once it is on the machine.
Built to be quiet about your students
Reading analytics record which pages were opened, never what a student wrote. Note text and bookmark labels are never collected, and visitor IP addresses are hashed rather than stored. Private notes are never included in an exported copy.
One honest caveat: an offline copy is a convenience, not copy protection. Once a book is on a student's machine the page images are ordinary files. Please don't rely on offline export to protect material you cannot afford to have shared.
Common questions
Does it really support Arabic?
Yes. Right-to-left books paginate right-to-left, the interface is translated into Arabic, and there is an Arabic read-aloud voice. A book's direction is stored per book, so Arabic and English titles can live side by side in the same library.
Can students read without an internet connection?
Yes. You can export any book as a desktop application for Windows or Linux, or as a self-contained folder that opens in a browser. Both work with no connection. macOS builds are not available yet.
Do students need to create accounts?
Not to read a published book — a link is enough. Accounts (or signed tokens if the book is embedded in your own system) are what let a student keep private notes and reading progress across devices.
How large can a textbook be?
Large. The platform handles multi-hundred-page course packs and scanned textbooks; the exact page and file-size ceiling depends on your plan, and institutional plans raise it considerably.
How do we get seats for a department or a whole school?
Tell us roughly how many readers and how many books a month you expect and we will put a plan together. Volume pricing for schools and universities is arranged directly rather than sold self-service.
Tell us what your students need
Class size, languages, and whether the rooms have reliable internet — that is usually enough for us to suggest the right setup.