Plainly

The problem

The classics are full of ideas worth reading. But Victorian sentence structure, archaic vocabulary and paragraphs that run for half a page keep most readers away. People who would love Wuthering Heights or Moby Dick never make it past chapter two.

Existing "modernized" editions either butcher the original or skip the hard parts. I wanted something different: the full original text, preserved, and right next to it a faithful modern translation, paragraph for paragraph, free for everyone.

Side-by-side reading

Every rewritten book on Plainly has both versions. Read the original alone, the modern alone, or both side by side and jump between them. Paragraph boundaries match exactly, so you never lose your place when you switch.

The translation isn't a summary or a paraphrase. Every sentence in the original has a corresponding sentence in modern English, and the meaning, tone and structure are preserved.

The translation rules

"Modern English" is vague, so the pipeline holds every chapter to a concrete target: Flesch-Kincaid grade 7–9, the level most U.S. news sites aim for.

• Replace archaic vocabulary. Thee, wherefore, betwixt, countenance become you, why, between, face.
• Break up long sentences. A 60-word sentence with three semicolons becomes two or three shorter ones.
• Modernize idioms. Obscure references get their closest modern equivalent.
• Preserve meaning, tone and structure. Paragraph boundaries stay put; names and dialogue stay intact.
• No summarizing, no skipping. Nothing is dropped because it was "implied".
• Keep period detail. Characters still ride in carriages, not Ubers.

A mechanical gate checks all of this before anything reaches the database: paragraph counts must match exactly, each chapter must stay between 50% and 110% of the original's length, every paragraph must end on a sentence terminator, and summary language ("this passage", "the narrator") is rejected. Then a separate, fresh agent reads every pair for meaning, because a fluent sentence can still be wrong.

By the numbers

• 90 classic books from Project Gutenberg, 69 with a complete plain-English rewrite.
• 4,163 chapters parsed and aligned.
• About 7.4 million words of plain-English prose.

How it's built

• Backend: Python and Flask, with SQLite for storage.
• Rewriting: the first books went through a multi-pass Google Gemini pipeline. Newer ones are written by Claude Sonnet subagents in numbered chunks of about 12,000 characters, then checked by the mechanical gate and a fresh verifier agent. Both paths share one copy of the rewriting rules.
• Reader: a vanilla JS reader with page-based reading, light, dark and sepia themes, chapter illustrations and audio, plus a Kindle mode with phone-assisted sign-in.
• Tests: a pytest suite and Playwright end-to-end scenarios.

The hardest part

Not the translation itself, but getting paragraph boundaries to match exactly across 4,000+ chapters. LLMs love to merge or split paragraphs silently, and a single off-by-one breaks the side-by-side view. The pipeline has six steps just for paragraph alignment.